From The Huffington Post:

Corporate Taxes as Percentage Of Profits Now Lowest In Decades As a percentage of ever-growing profits, corporations are paying less in taxes than they have in decades. Thanks in part to federal tax breaks, corporations paid out just 12.1 percent of their 2011 profits in taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That's well below the country's top marginal corporate tax rate of 35 percent -- and as The Wall Street Journal notes, it's the lowest percentage corporations have paid since 1972. During the two previous decades, a period that included the economic prosperity of the 1990s and the housing boom of the George W. Bush administration, corporations were paying an average percentage almost twice as high. The CBO's numbers undercut a popular conservative claim -- that the United States places a higher tax burden on its corporations than almost any other first-world nation -- and arrive at a time when national politicians are engaged in a fierce rhetorical battle over how much wealthy institutions and individuals should pay to the government. Corporations reported a combined $1.97 trillion in profits in the third quarter of 2011. As recently as June, they were also believed to be sitting on more than $2 trillion in cash hoardings. Most of that money has not been touched by taxation, even though the federal government has experienced budget shortfalls of more than $1 trillion for each of the past four years, and is scrambling to cut back on staff and services as a result. Meanwhile, the money isn't going to employees either, as real wages for most Americans declined in 2011 in spite of strong corporate balance sheets.