When US Senator Bernie Sanders declared this week that a taxpayer who paid even a single dollar in federal income tax had contributed more than Walt Disney, Tesla, CVS, and over a dozen other Fortune 500 corporations, the reaction was a mix of outrage and disbelief. But the numbers are not disputed — they come straight from the companies’ own public filings.
If you paid $1 in federal income taxes this year, you paid more than:
Walt Disney
Citigroup
CVS
Kohl’s
Ticketmaster
Tesla
United Airlines
GoDaddy
Paypal
Palantir
Roku
HP
3M
PG&E
HalliburtonThat’s absurd. We need real and progressive tax reform.
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) April 17, 2026
A landmark April 2026 report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) confirmed that at least 88 profitable American corporations collectively earned more than $105 billion in US pretax income for 2025 and paid zero dollars in federal corporate income tax. Disney reported roughly $8.3 billion in domestic profit. Tesla reported $5.7 billion. United Airlines, $4.3 billion. The tax bill for each: nothing. Some even received net rebates from the government.
Half a world away, a strikingly familiar story plays out — just with different names and currencies.
Pakistan’s Federal Board of Revenue has publicly acknowledged that the country’s top earners, roughly 670,000 individuals, evade an estimated Rs 1.2 trillion in taxes annually through deliberate underreporting. Only 12 people in a recent national disclosure declared wealth exceeding Rs 10 billion — a figure that strains credibility in a country where politicians, feudal landlords, business dynasties, and establishment-linked families visibly maintain vast real estate holdings, luxury fleets, and overseas assets.
The Pandora Papers of 2021 and Panama Papers of 2016 exposed over 700 Pakistanis — including sitting cabinet ministers — operating offshore vehicles in secrecy jurisdictions, quietly sheltering wealth while the country runs a tax-to-GDP ratio of barely 10%, among the lowest in the world.
The mechanisms differ in sophistication but converge in outcome.
American corporations deploy armies of tax attorneys to exploit accelerated depreciation, offshore profit-shifting, R&D credits, and carried interest loopholes — all perfectly legal, all devastatingly effective. Pakistan’s elites rely on a different toolkit: agricultural income that is constitutionally under-taxed, nil-income returns filed alongside conspicuously lavish social media lifestyles, and political influence that keeps enforcement selective.
In both systems, the salaried middle class — taxed at source, with little room to maneuver — absorbs a disproportionate share of the national burden. The FBR has even launched an AI-powered “Lifestyle Monitoring Cell” to catch influencers and elites whose Instagram feeds contradict their tax filings, a revealing indicator of just how brazen the mismatch has become.
What unites these two countries — and dozens more exposed by global watchdogs like Oxfam and the EU Tax Observatory — is not corruption in the simple sense, but a deeper structural failure: the rules themselves are written to accommodate wealth. Capital is mobile; labor is not. Corporations and billionaires can route profits through Delaware shell companies or Dubai trusts; a schoolteacher in Karachi or a nurse in Ohio cannot. The result, documented repeatedly by the IMF and UNDP, is what analysts now call “upside-down tax systems” — where effective tax rates on accumulated wealth can fall to near zero, while wages are taxed in full, automatically, before a worker sees a single rupee or dollar.
The fix, experts agree, is neither simple nor painless. It demands closing obvious loopholes, enforcing minimum corporate taxes, treating capital gains with the same rigor as wages, and building the kind of international information-sharing architecture that makes offshore hiding genuinely costly.
Above all, it requires political will — the one resource that, in Islamabad and Washington alike, remains most conspicuously in short supply. Until then, the unwritten social contract quietly holds: the powerful opt out, and everyone else picks up the bill.
