Evizda

As the nation’s largest fast food giants continue to push back against the ongoing fight for better wages by fast food workers across the country, a report released Monday reveals a world in which those companies are “pocketing massive taxpayer subsidies” as they feed their CEOs’ growing paychecks.

According to the report, Fast Food CEOs Rake in Taxpayer-Subsidized Pay, published by the Institute for Policy Studies, current tax code allows corporations such as Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, and McDonald’s “to deduct unlimited amounts from their income taxes for the cost of stock options, certain stock grants, and other forms of so-called ‘performance pay’ for top executives,” meaning that the more corporations pay their top earners, the less they pay in federal taxes.

As IPS reports, over the past two years, CEOs of the top six publicly held fast food chains brought home over $183 million in deductible “performance pay,” which in turn reduced their companies’ taxes by an estimated $64 million.

As Sarah Anderson from IPS points out in an op-ed Monday, $64 million is enough to cover the average cost of food stamps for 40,000 American families for a year.

Fast food profits, in this way, come at the taxpayer’s expense from two sides: while CEOs’ paychecks expand and corporations pay less in taxes, those companies have simultaneously worked “to keep low-level workers’ wages so low that many must rely on public assistance.”