IS THE GOP PROTECTING TAX CHEATS?
Talk about investigative journalism! Hats off to ProPublica—that nonprofit group of journalists who make it their mission to expose “abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust.” They’ve really performed a minor miracle this time.
We all know how hard it bas been to get even a glimpse of serial criminal Donald J. Trump’s tax returns. Well, hold on to your rosary beads, ProPublica has somehow managed to access the returns (and they’re not telling how) of Jeff Bezos (now the world’s richest man), Warren Buffet, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, Carl Icahn, and Rupert Murdoch. What do the 15 years of returns tell us? The myth that everyone pays their fair share and the richest pay the most is so laughable it hurts. If you believe that you should know that the tooth fairy is a shill for the American Dental Association.
Did you know that in 2007 and again in 2011 Jeff Bezos paid the IRS not a penny. Elon Musk, the world’s second richest man, paid nothing in 2018. In recent years Michael Bloomberg paid nothing once and Carl Icahn paid nothing twice. And it’s all legal.
But how do they pull it off? By hiring smart tax accountants who know every tax code loophole in their tax avoidance strategies, but chiefly through appreciation in property and stock holdings; those gains are not taxable by law until they are sold.
In crunching their numbers, ProPublica sets the median American household income at roughly $70,000 a year. Of that amount we common folks pay 14% in federal taxes. Using numbers from Forbes magazine, ProPublica calculates that between 2014 and 2018 the 25 richest Americans’ worth rose 401 billion dollars, on which they paid 1.6 billion in federal taxes. That may seem a lot, but it amounts to a true tax rate of a mere 3.4%.
ProPublica’s math produces other sums that might anger that median family. Those top 25 tax payers were worth 1.1 trillion dollars in 2018. By comparison, “it would take 14.3 million ordinary American wage earners put together to equal that same amount of wealth.”
Bottom line? The top 25 plutocrats would pay a personal federal tax bill of $1.9 billion in 2018. And those wage earners? They get stuck with a 143 billion dollar tab.
“Ouch!” you folks making a mere $200,000 a year cry out. “That’s not fair! Our tax code has to be fixed! “
Don’t hold your breath. Consider President Biden’s “bipartisan” Infrastructure Bill presently staggering through the Senate, where Republicans are doing their usual foot dragging; they don’t care much for the provision to raise corporate taxes to help pay for rebuilding America. And they don’t like the bill’s giving more money to the underfunded IRS to chase down tax cheats for additional funding;
their conservative backers don’t like that. Would it be impolite to ask if any of the Favored Twenty-Five mentioned above are among those conservative backers?
More proof that life—and our tax system—isn’t fair. But then you already knew that.
ProPublica is supported by our donations, and I can’t think of a better group to give to in these insanely corrupt times. Here’s hoping my contribution is tax deductible.