Who are these lobbyists who collectively get paid more then the company pays in taxes (or more that it pays its CEO)? How many lobbyists does a company hire? A worthy area of research.

Incidentally, the salary of a CEO should reflect his marginal contribution to the gross receipts of the company, while the tax paid depends on the company's net profits.

in what world should a company with operating income of about 65 billion, and about 3.3 billion profit get away with about 13 million in tax

also I am pretty sure those lobbyists worked on getting that 300-400 million tax credit every year. also making sure that the millitary buys enough planes.

So is your beef about what the CEO gets paid, or what taxes the company pays?

And why should the company, if it is a corporation, pay any taxes at all? The taxes on the company's profits should be paid by the company's owners--the shareholders. If the company itself doesn't pay taxes, it wouldn't have to spend lots of money on lobbyists to get tax breaks.

Better yet, tax consumption rather than production.

Companies don't pay taxes. Only people do.

Companies just pass the taxes on to the consumer.

Corporate tax is just a hidden sales tax. Politicians love corporate taxes because the consumer will often blame the increased prices on the business itself and has no idea of the underlying tax on production of said product.

That's incorrect dead. Costs do not dictate market value as much as supply and demand do. You learned this in economics right? Another good example kid speculative goods like oil which cost relatively nothing to produce for what they cost. I do believe Shell Oil holds the top 10 highest grossing years records for a single company. It's all profit for them.

Taxes serve two purposes, a counter to wealth condensation and two a necessary revenue for the government to promote the welfare of it's people. Two good things there. What exactly is bad about a company that makes record profits paying higher taxes?

Costs do dictate market value. The price of a good, set by supply and demand, incorporates the opportunity cost of the resources that could have been used to produce something else that people would be willing to pay more to buy.

And extraction costs of oil are not zero because the opportunity cost of making the oil available now is the forsaken opportunity of making the oil available later when people would be willing to pay more for it, discounted to present value.

Go back to ECON 101, unpronouncable.

The only thing costs dictate are profitability of a market and perhaps the number of firms (how easy or hard it is to enter a market). Supply and demand is what values a product. But obviously supply means nothing without demand which is why supply side economics don't work. We've been using a policy of supply-side economics in the US for the last 30 years and look where it's gotten us: we're ranked 46th in income disparity, next to Uganda and Uruguay, our healthcare is ranked 37th, next to Cuba. It's really shocking how poorly our country has farred since we adopted the more conservative policies of Robald Reagan and then the neo-cons who retook the house after 40 years.

I leave you with this image dead: http://imgur.com/vQaog

Right skrum, you said it for me costs only indirectly affect the market because of opportunity costs. This translates into how easy or difficult it is to enter a market. For instance it's very difficult to enter the telecommunications market in the US, as opposed to Australia because of how the costs are set up.