This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 18th, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

A new report says that most of the corporations that do business in the United States

manage to avoid paying corporate income taxes,

exasperating many politicians who would like to get a chunk of that change.

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Dan Mitchell, co-author of the new Cato Book Global Tax Revolution, says there's more to the numbers

and meets the eye.

The Government Accountability Office has just released a report saying that a significant share of corporate... the don't pay a tax in selected years.

And a lot of politicians have said,

this is a scandal.

This must mean something's going on,

because of course they're always greedy for more revenue.

But the report frankly doesn't say anything terribly surprising. We know that there are

lots of companies out there, say auto companies, airline companies that are losing money.

So it's hardly a surprise that in some years they don't pay any tax.

We also know that small companies, the ones that are just formed in their early years, very

rarely make money.

Most new companies are money losing propositions and of

course a lot of them wind up going bankrupt. So the fact that a lot of companies

aren't paying taxes in some years is really a non-story. It's only the politicians who want to somehow

use the story as an excuse to try to grab more power and more revenue. They're the

ones that are making it a big issue. If the GAO wanted to do a good study,

...