By Li Hongmei

It is known that America is the land of the free and the home of the brave. The only problem is that today's America is the home of corporations which are free from paying income taxes. It is also the home of the bravest tax evasion schemes in the world.

Cheat on taxes? Not cool, say most Americans

A bruising battle in Washington over the so-called fiscal cliff, a series of tax hikes and spending cuts that were scheduled to take effect until Congress reached a last-minute deal also raised taxes for wealthy Americans earning $400,000 or more and allowed taxes on capital gains and dividends to go up. It also ended a payroll tax holiday, meaning that most Americans are seeing more of their paycheck going to the tax man for Social Security and other entitlements this year.

Americans make plenty of jokes about cheating on their taxes, but a new survey finds that in reality most don't think it's OK to rob the tax man.

The 2012 Taxpayer Attitude Survey, released Tuesday by the independent oversight board, finds that 87 percent of Americans don't think it's OK to cheat on your taxes. That's a 3 percentage point increase from last year.

Perhaps more surprising, 95 percent of Americans said their personal integrity influences them to report their taxes honestly, an 8 percentage point increase from five years earlier.

About 63 percent said they are influenced by fear of an audit, while 70 percent are motivated by third-party information that could show them to be a tax cheat.

The IRS Oversight Board, an independent body created by Congress in 1998 to oversee the Internal Revenue Service's actions, completed its annual survey of 1,500 Americans last August and September. The survey has a 3.1 percent margin of error.

If they're going to pay their taxes honestly, most Americans seem to think everyone else should, too.

The survey found that more than 90 percent of Americans think it's important that the IRS ensures that low- and high-income taxpayers, small businesses and corporations honestly pay their taxes, too.

Those results appear to show that Americans have come to feel more strongly in recent years that everyone should pay their fair share of taxes, and the IRS should vigorously enforce tax laws.

Profitable businesses pay no income tax

American corporate watchdog Citizens for Tax Justice discovered that Facebook Inc. found a way to use a tax exemption scheme in order to pay zero dollars in income taxes. The whole situation should be outrageous as it is but the situation is actually worse, because Facebook's tax optimization consultants have found a way to make the government pay Facebook.

Judging by the figures mentioned in Facebook's 10K report, the corporation will receive 429 million dollars from the government for the fiscal year 2012. The government is also set to dish out an additional amount of 5.8 billion dollars because of "NOL tax loss carry forwards created by stock compensation".

The American corporate tax code has a number of loopholes that are used extensively by the US corporations to make the government pay them instead of paying the government.

For instance, in Facebook's case, the loophole used by the corporate tax dodgers is the obligation of the government to compensate losses for stock options distributed to employees and executives.

It is clearly a "double win" situation for the corporate bosses. The more their stock options and stock compensation increases in value, the more money the government will pay to the corporations they manage and own.

If we exclude the corporation from the scheme, as it is merely a transit point for the flow of money, we have a direct transfer of wealth from the government to the managers of the biggest US corporations.

One of the most widespread myths of the today's world has been busted. It is not the poor people who live on governmental welfare; it is the corporate bosses who are the main beneficiaries of the government's welfare systems.

Of course, no congressman or senator dares to admit this, because that would result in the loss of their hard-earned money coming from the corporate lobbyists.