A troubling report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy provides a stark reminder of how thoroughly the system remains tilted against the little guy. At least 88 profitable U.S. corporations paid zero federal income tax in 2025 despite reporting more than $105 billion in U.S. pretax income. At the statutory 21 percent rate, these companies should have owed roughly $22.1 billion. Instead, they collected $4.7 billion in rebates, pocketing a collective $26.7 billion in tax breaks. Measured against the pre-2017 rate of 35 percent, the savings climb to an estimated $41 billion in a single year.
The examples are not obscure. Tesla reported nearly $5.7 billion in U.S. income and paid nothing. United Airlines cleared almost $4.3 billion in U.S. income with the same zero federal tax bill. Southwest Airlines did the same on $561 million. Yum! Brands, parent of KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut, paid zero on more than $1 billion in U.S. pretax profits. Digital payment firms PayPal, Toast, and Block together wiped out federal taxes on $3.2 billion in income. Live Nation Entertainment joined them with $98 million. These are not struggling firms scraping by; they are household names that thrive while the tax code they helped shape treats them as if they earned nothing.
Let’s be clear: MAGA is not, and should never become, a pro-taxation movement. The long-term goal remains the abolition of the income tax and the IRS itself, which are inherently unconstitutional. Government does not need an army of bureaucrats extracting a portion of every paycheck and every profit statement. Yet as long as an income tax exists, the principle of equal application cannot be optional. Your local contractor, restaurant owner, or machine shop pays mightily or suffers massive consequences. Ergo, the corporate giants must pay as well. In fact, if anything, the largest players should shoulder a heavier burden relative to their size because they already extract disproportionate benefits from the system through regulatory capture, lobbying, corporate welfare, and preferential access to federal contracts and bailouts.
Everyone who has ever tried to start or grow a small business understands the disparity. The rules are written in a language that only armies of lawyers and accountants can navigate. Accelerated depreciation, research credits, immediate R&D expensing, foreign-derived income deductions, and stock-option write-offs are not equally available to the Main Street entrepreneur who lacks a tax department larger than most towns’ police forces. The result is a two-tier system in which the biggest players can drive their effective rates to zero while the rest of the country funds the government that those same players influence. This is not free-market capitalism. It is a rigged game, and the American people know it. That knowledge is one reason the status quo is so widely despised.
The companies themselves are not the primary villains. They are acting in their own self-interest, just as market economics would predict. No rational actor seeks to pay more tax than the law requires. The shame belongs to the bureaucratic system that makes these outcomes legal and routine. The same administrative state that MAGA and the Department of Government Efficiency set out to dismantle is the engine that produces these disparities. Waste, fraud, and bailouts flow from Washington into the balance sheets of the well-connected. The corporations grow fat from that upward flow while ordinary businesses and workers suffer the consequences. Inequality widens. Social trust erodes. A country cannot remain great when the rules are openly disparate for the powerful and the rest.
Radical socialists understand this dynamic and weaponize it. They hammer corporate cronyism with relentless focus. Their solutions—confiscatory rates, industrial policy directed by the same bureaucrats who created the problem, and ever-expanding government—are destructive. But the public often does not care about the details of the alternative. People simply hate the existing arrangement and will embrace whoever appears to oppose it with the most gusto. When Republicans look the other way because those same corporations write large checks to their campaigns and affiliated PACs, the party forfeits credibility with independents and younger voters. Without those groups, the Republican coalition becomes an endangered species. The Left is skilled at demagoguing the issue and placing conservatives on the defensive whenever Republicans appear to defend the indefensible.
The only durable answer is to promote fairness within a free-market framework: capitalism with genuine guardrails that prevent the richest and most connected from exploiting the rest. That does not mean higher overall tax rates or new layers of regulation. It means closing the pathways that allow profitable giants to pay nothing while smaller competitors are squeezed. It means ending the corporate welfare that distorts markets and rewards political access over productive investment. It means treating the administrative state itself as the core problem rather than a permanent fixture to be managed.
Several straightforward steps follow from these principles and align with the DOGE impulse to shrink waste and special privilege. First, simplify the corporate tax code so thoroughly that most of the specialized deductions, credits, and timing gimmicks disappear. A broader base with fewer carve-outs reduces the advantage of scale and legal firepower. Second, terminate federal subsidies, preferential loans, and bailout authority that function as off-budget transfers to favored firms. Third, continue aggressive reduction of the regulatory thicket that large corporations help write and then use as barriers to entry against smaller rivals. Fourth, insist on transparency and accountability for every tax expenditure so that the public can see, in plain language, who benefits and by how much. None of these measures requires expanding the IRS or inventing new restrictions on legitimate business activity. They require the opposite: fewer rules, less discretion for bureaucrats, and an end to the private-public partnerships that enrich the already powerful.
MAGA’s strength has always been its willingness to name the ways the system is stacked against ordinary Americans. Pretending that zero-tax outcomes for multi-billion-dollar firms are somehow a free-market triumph is a betrayal of that insight. The administrative state and the corporate interests that feed on it are not separate problems; they reinforce each other. Defeating one requires confronting the other. If the movement allows the super-wealthy to keep their loopholes while small businesses and workers carry the load, the public will eventually look elsewhere for relief. The radical left is ready with its own false promises. The only way to keep MAGA from becoming a temporary interlude is to apply its core principles—fairness, accountability, and hostility to the deep state—consistently, including to the corporate elite that has learned to game the system for its own benefit. The alternative is a slow erosion of trust that no amount of campaign contributions can reverse, which will make the rise of the far-left socialists an inevitability.
Financial disclosures can only partially answer questions about corporate accountability. ITEP identifies depreciation deductions, research credits, research expensing, and other provisions as contributors to the reported outcomes. Confidential tax returns prevent a complete reconstruction of each company’s liability. A zero federal income tax figure itself does not establish misconduct. But pair that with billion-dollar pre-tax incomes, and you've far exceeded the threshold of unfair.
Well said.