GE will pay $0 in taxes on $14.2 billion worldwide profits

With its far-flung operations pumping in billions in profits - $14.2 billion in 2010 – General Electric faces a tax burden of nothing.

Zip. Goose egg. Zilch. Nada.

In terms of its American tax bill, the corporation benefits from a $3.2 billion break, at which it arrived through the sophisticated services of its corporate tax department – acknowledged as the best in the business.

According to filings on its Japanese operations, made just prior to the earthquake disaster, its American tax burden is 7.4 percent of its profits – but only if it brings the funds back into the American economy. Leave the dough in foreign banks or in offshore securities and the result is the same as nothing.

Though GE is the biggest and the best at what it does to avoid taxes, it's not alone.

According to a report published in “The New York Times,” corporate share of the nation's tax receipts have fallen from 30 percent of all federal revenue in the mid-1950's to 6.6 percent in 2009.

President Barack Obama believes in the myth that American taxes are so high, multinationals have to seek their profits overseas that he has appointed G.E.'s chief executive, Jeffrey R. Immelt, to head a commission studying ways to make the nation more competitive by lowering corporate taxes even more.

General Electric is the contractor at the Japanese nuclear power plant which exploded and burned following an earthquake there last month. Radiation levels in seawater that cools the plant are millions of times higher than normal as a result.