State tax revenues make possible the public services and infrastructure that Californians rely on, like education, roads and transit, and the social safety net to help families and individuals make ends meet during times of financial instability. Corporations doing business in California benefit from the state’s resources and investments and should be expected to fairly contribute to state revenues.
Corporations Underpaying Their Fair Share
Meanwhile, corporations have been paying around half of what they did a generation ago in state taxes as a share of their California income — less than 5% in 2019 compared to 9.5% in the early 1980s — due in part to state tax rate reductions and the creation and growth of corporate tax breaks over the years. This is despite the fact that pre-tax corporate profits have been near record highs (as are after-tax profits).
In addition, the taxes these corporations pay to the state on their California profits are an incredibly small fraction of their expenses — just 0.11% on average from 2017 to 2019, according to a Budget Center analysis of Franchise Tax Board data.1Business expenses are defined in this analysis as the total deductions reported to the Franchise Tax Board for corporations filing taxes in California. Data for tax years 2020 and 2021 are excluded from this analysis because a pandemic-era temporary policy was in place for these years that limited the ability of corporations to fully utilize tax credits and to offset current-year income with prior-year losses. Therefore, corporate tax collections were higher in these years than in normal years. In other words, just over one cent of every $10 of what these businesses spent went to California corporate taxes.
Even if state leaders increased corporate taxes to protect and strengthen public services — by raising tax rates on the most profitable corporations and/or limiting corporate tax breaks — these taxes would still represent a small fraction of total business expenses. For example, if corporations had contributed $2.5 billion more in taxes each year, their California corporate taxes would have made up 0.13% of total business expenses. If they had contributed $5 billion more, these taxes would have made up 0.16% of their expenses.
To put this in perspective, $2.5 billion in additional revenue could boost the incomes of families by more than $2,000 for every child living in poverty in the state, and $5 billion could provide more than $4,000 per impoverished child. However, it would not substantially increase the costs of doing business for profitable corporations and would be unlikely to drive companies’ decisions about how much business to do in California. This is especially true considering that corporations’ tax obligations to the state are based on how much of their sales are made in California, and California provides a considerable customer base.
Substantial Benefits for Struggling Californians
While a tax increase of either size would be manageable for wealthy corporations, the resulting revenue could be very meaningful for Californians struggling with the basic costs of living, including housing, food, child care, and health expenses. Many of these Californians have been locked out of economic security in large part due to the low wages, insufficient benefits, and few advancement opportunities provided by some of these very wealthy corporations. Californians of color have been particularly excluded from economic opportunities due to structural racism and discrimination in employment and other arenas.
Corporations Can Afford to Contribute More
Highly profitable businesses in California benefit from having healthy, well-educated workers who can afford to live near their jobs and have the necessary care and education for their children while they work. These corporations can afford to pay a small increase in state corporate taxes to support caring for and educating California’s children and youth, keeping the state’s residents healthy and housed, and ensuring they don’t fall through the cracks when faced with a crisis.
