Reddit reviews Financial Modeling and Valuation: A Practical Guide to Investment Banking and Private Equity

It seems you are interested in public policy more than the mechanics of finance and accounting. It's also worth noting that when arguing a point people tend to dismiss the views of someone who must resort to petty insults, so if you are ever having a real discussion with someone about this it would be wise to avoid doing so.

Those losses were not insignificant compared to their overall profitability. Remember, this is done on an annual basis. If they made $100 billion last year but lost $1 million this year they would not owe income taxes this year, barring any deferred taxes due. They quite literally lost more money than they made in certain areas of operation; the government does not tax anybody on losses and allows them to be carried forward or backward for a certain amount of time. This is as true for Grandma's Bakery down the street as it is for a multi national corporation.

After looking at their recent annual reports the vast majority of their tax credits and lower rates come from foreign operations. So I suppose you will be glad to know that other countries incentivize research and development of cleaner energy technology much more than the US does. In fact, in 2009 (the year they had an effective negative tax rate of 11.5%) the total breaks from the US only lowered their rate from 35% to 30.5%. The rest was due to a combination of foreign credits and lower foreign statutory rates.

And no, we did not end up paying them anything. That's not how negative effective tax rates work, at all. If you are actually interested in this, and not just spouting emotional hatred for evil corporations, I highly suggest reading through Financial Modeling and Valuation: A Practical Guide to Investment Banking and Private Equity. It will give you great tools to separate what's really going on from media fluff pieces, and you will have an excellent base of knowledge to actually debate the (in)effectiveness of corporate tax credits. Anyways, a negative effective tax rate simply means that the taxes they actually paid to the IRS were less than the total taxes they report in their financial statements. This is due to differences in accounting for depreciation, carried losses, credits, and deferring taxes until a later year. GE has significant deferred taxes that get paid in pieces each year, and will all be paid.

Furthermore, according to the lobbying group Citizens for Tax Justice, which fights to close loopholes and increase statutory rates, the total amount of tax subsidies enjoyed by the 288 most profitable companies over the last five years was $362 billion, or an average of $72.5 billion per year. The federal government took in $2.8 trillion in taxes in 2013. In other words, if all those tax subsidies had actually been collected it would have represented a grand total of a 2.58% increase in tax revenue for the government. This isn't exactly a significant amount.

And for what it's worth, my personal opinion is that I would rather see tax incentives for things like developing cleaner technologies than giving that money to a government that spends a full 25% of its revenue on national defense but only 1% on education. There are absolutely loopholes that should be closed, such as what some tech companies are doing by incorporating in Ireland and leasing their intellectual property to their US "subsidiary", effectively avoiding US taxes for nothing. However, this does not mean that every time it is reported that a company had zero or negative taxes in the US that there is some shady conspiracy going on designed to line the pockets of Mr. Scrooge CEO.

Pick up this book: https://www.amazon.com/Financial-Modeling-Valuation-Practical-Investment/dp/1118558766/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1497908564&sr=8-1&keywords=financial+modeling+wiley

Skills are transferable. You are learning accounting after all.