TAX DODGE 3 policy

bak capt 819

merri ok

antag = good support = bad

SEE DOGE ~ irs pro tax dodgers

see 2025 trump

see TAX DODGE 2 916

SEE VOODOO TAX CUTS

see subsidy/ loopholes

see carried interest and capital gaINS

see DAF AND FAMILY FDN

distinction here? not so much

SEE TWO SANTAS

SEE INEQUALITY --> INSTABILITY

see maga mike ~ IRS BS intuit

---

aha: tax dodge = amplifying feedback --> inequality/ polarization --> instability --> crisis

aha2 // bill hide $ in fam fdn, attack gubmint, degrade ability to work, trash more rinse repeat downward death spiral

---

just cut irs enforcement 4 25)

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-=-=

TEARING UP TAKING OVER DC GOLF ~AA?

Exposed: How Trump uses golf courses to dodge millions in taxes

-=-=

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AN 2 26

WSJ warns Trump’s billionaire tax cut is hurting the US economy

The Wall Street Journalhas a history of loving tax cuts, but in a new report, they're warning that President Donald Trump's billionaire tax cuts are hurting the U.S. economy.

As recently as Dec. 31, the Journal was singing the praisesof the nine states in which people would pay less in taxes. A little over a month later, Carol Ryan wrote that when billionaires don't pay their taxes, "look at who picks up the tab."

"Wealth concentration is affecting the wider economy," the report said, and it "shows why the issue isn’t going away."

California is proposing a wealth tax, which WSJ is concerned about, but only because for many rich households, their money is tied to the stock market.

"This could mean the entire economy pays a steep price in the next market correction," the report said.

"California has the highest concentration of billionaires in the U.S. with 255 individuals, or slightly more than a fifth of the country’s billionaire population," the report said, citing the wealth-intelligence firm Altrata.

A proposal for a ballot measure in November would levy an amount "calculated based on whichever is the higher of a billionaire’s voting interest or economic interest in a company." It would be a one-time levy on the wealth of any California resident worth over $1 billion. The solution is an idea to fix the Medicaid shortfall left by the GOP's significant cuts to the program in the "One Big Beautiful Bill" measure passed last year.

The right-wing Tax Foundation claims it will hurt tech leaders.

The ultrarich could simply leave California if they're unhappy, which is what Elon Musk did when he moved SpaceX and Tesla to Texas. However, Musk claims he did it because he was angry over gender identity laws. The ballot measure must still collect signatures before it can be up for a vote.

The Journal noted that Google co-founder Sergey Brin left California for Florida and Lake Tahoe, Nevada. He also moved several LLCs to Nevada.

Far-right Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel suggested he might do the same.

The Journal claims that such threats from billionaires might be enough to convince California voters not to tax the ultrawealthy.

The Investment Migration Council wrote on its websitethat "tax avoidance is the main reason actor Yul Brynner, entrepreneur Eduardo Saverin and inventor Earl Tupper abandoned U.S. citizenship."

One of the biggest arguments Democrats made in 2022 was for adding more workers to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to focus on tax evasion by the wealthiest Americans, which costs the U.S. approximately $150 billion each year, CNBC reported.

The Journal expects that billionaire tax evasion will likely become a more significant issue as the U.S. economy continues to slump and the wealth gap grows.

Since 1990, the WSJ has reported that the top 0.1 percent of wage earners now hold a much larger share of U.S. wealth. In the past 26 years, it has grown 14.4 percent for them.

"Meanwhile, the bottom half of American households have lost ground. Their 2.5 percent cut of the country’s wealth has slipped from 3.5 percent in 1990," the report said.

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AN COMMON DR 12 25

As workers face slowing wage growth, a worsening cost-of-living crisis, and rising unemployment, the chief executives of top corporate retailers in the United States are reaping huge gains from the tax cuts that US President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans extended over the summer.

An analysis released Friday by the progressive advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) estimates that the CEOs of Amazon, Best Buy, Costco, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Target, TJX, and Walmart have collectively saved close to $35 million on their individual tax returns in the seven years the Trump tax cuts have been in effect.

Thanks to the Trump-GOP tax law, which took effect in 2018, the companies examined in the analysis paid a tax rate of just 17.5% between 2018 and 2024—roughly half what they paid prior to the law’s enactment.

“While at the same time prices have soared for consumers and retail workers remain stuck in low-wage jobs, big-store CEOs and shareholders have reaped higher profits and lower taxes,” David Kass, ATF’s executive director, said in a statement. “If we want a system that alleviates economic stress on average Americans instead of exacerbating it during the holiday season, we need to raise taxes on corporations and the rich, invest in workers and families with expanded public services.”

Workers at the major retailers haven’t fared nearly as well. ATF noted that “the average worker at the eight stores was paid less than $32,000 in 2024.

“Amazon—the world’s largest retailer—refuses to even sit down with its employees who have formed a labor union for better pay, benefits, and working conditions,” the group observed. “If Lowe’s had used the nearly $50 billion it spent on stock buybacks over the seven-year period to instead raise employee wages, its workers would have each been paid almost $200,000 more.”

Across the US economy, workers are seeing wage growth stagnate amid elevated and still-rising prices, which are forcing many to skip meals and ration their medications to make ends meet.

The Labor Department said earlier this week that wage growth decelerated to 3.5% year over year—the slowest pace since before the Covid-19 pandemic. Unemployment, meanwhile, rose in November to the highest level in four years.

The ATF analysis came days after Trump delivered a lie-filled primetime speech defending his handling of the US economy as his approval ratings tanked, with American voters across party lines increasingly furious over the high costs of housing, groceries, healthcare, and other necessities.

During the speech, Trump vowed that Americans would soon “see the results of the largest tax cuts in American history.”

But the richest people in the country are set to reap disproportionate benefits from the tax cuts. As Bloomberg reported earlier this week, “Many filers—particularly those who could most use the financial boost—may soon be disappointed.”

“Wealthy taxpayers in high-tax states like California, New York, and New Jersey are the biggest winners,” the outlet noted.

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AN 11 25

The Trump administration is quietly waging an all-out regulatory war on a Biden-era corporate tax that aimed to prevent large companies from dodging their tax liabilities while reporting huge profits.

The corporate alternative minimum tax (CAMT) was enacted as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, Democratic legislation that former President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022. The CAMT requires highly profitable US corporations to pay a tax of at least 15% on their so-called book profits, the figures reported to shareholders.

As the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy has explained: “Many of the special breaks that corporations use to avoid taxes work by allowing companies to report profits to the IRS that are much smaller than their book profits. Corporate leaders prefer to report low profits to the IRS (to reduce taxes) and high profits to the public (to attract investors).”

But since President Donald Trump took office in January, his administration has issued guidance and regulatory proposals designed to gut the CAMT. The effort is a boon to corporate giants and rich private equity investors at a time when the Trump administration is relentlessly attacking programs for low-income Americans, including Medicaid and nutrition assistance.

TheNew York Times reported Saturday that “with its various tax relief provisions, the administration is now effectively adding hundreds of billions of dollars in new breaks for big businesses and investors” on top of the trillions of dollars in tax cuts included in the Trump-GOP budget law enacted over the summer.

“The Treasury is empowered to write rules to help the IRS carry out tax laws passed by Congress,” the newspaper added. “But the aggressive actions of the Trump administration raise questions about whether it is exceeding its legal authority.”

The administration’s assault on the CAMT has drawn scrutiny from members of Congress.

In a September 8 letter to US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a group of Democratic lawmakers and Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) warned that the administration’s guidance notices “create new loopholes in the corporate alternative minimum tax for the largest and wealthiest corporations.”

“Most troubling, Notice 2025-27, issued this June, allows companies to avoid CAMT if their income—under a simplified accounting method—is below $800 million,” the lawmakers wrote. “The Biden administration previously set the safe harbor threshold precisely at $500 million in its proposed CAMT rule after calculating that a higher safe harbor threshold would risk exempting corporations that should be subject to CAMT under statute.”

“Now, less than nine months later and with zero justification, this new guidance summarily asserts that an $800 million safe harbor will not run that risk,” they continued. “We are seriously concerned that this cursory loosening of CAMT enforcement will simply allow more wealthy corporations to avoid paying their legally owed share.”

ONLY NOT JRL FAIL

TV news barely covered Trump's Big Oil “quid pro quo” last year. Now that it's come to fruition, networks should give the scandal the attention it deserves.

Big Oil lands $1 billion tax break in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” as EPA staff are to “pause” oil and gas enforcement

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher

:{:{Published 06/20/25}:

Last May, The Washington Post published an exclusive story on a dinner at Mar-a-Lago in which Donald Trump promised to reverse then-President Joe Biden's actions on climate change as he asked Big Oil executives to fundraise $1 billion for his presidential campaign, assuring that they would be getting a “deal” due to the “taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him.” Reportedly, oil and gas executives did make “significant contributions to the Trump campaign.”

Over a four-day period, MSNBC was the only major TV network to cover the story, which All In host Chris Hayes described as “a political quid pro quo.”

Now, two new stories emerged this week that give more context to the promised “deal” the oil and gas industry is getting under Trump’s second term. National TV networks should inform their audience about how Big Oil is benefitting under Trump.

Bloomberg reported on June 17 that the Senate version of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” now includes a tax break for the oil and gas industry “estimated to be worth more than $1 billion.”

The provision would allow energy companies subject to a 15% corporate alternative minimum tax to deduct certain drilling costs when calculating their taxable income. Companies including ConocoPhillips, Ovintiv Inc. and Civitas Resources, Inc. lobbied in favor of it.

The change was included in the legislation released Monday by Republicans on the Senate tax writing committee, which would slash tax credits for wind, solar, electric vehicles and hydrogen.

…

Other supporters of the measure, which wasn’t included in the House version of the bill, include the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance, founded by oil billionaire and Trump donor Harold Hamm.

The same legislation would repeal tax credits for the clean power industry, which would threaten more than 800,000 jobs and raise energy prices for consumers.

In fact, clean energy technologies constituted93% of new power generation capacity added to the grid last year alone, and the climate provisions in the Inflation Reduction Actwhich Trump wants repealed, “have spurred the highest levels of factory construction in American history, with more than 400,000 new jobs announced across the country.”

Meanwhile, CNN reported on June 16 that “the Environmental Protection Agency has told staff overseeing the country’s industrialized Midwest — a region plagued by a legacy of pollution — to stop enforcing violations against fossil fuel companies.”

Four sources with knowledge of the situation at the EPA’s Region 5 office, which oversees six Midwestern states, told CNN that enforcement officials were informed that “there is a pause on oil and gas enforcement” at staff meetings.

“That is how our regional management is interpreting signals from the president,” the EPA enforcement staffer said.

Officers stopped being able to issue notices of violation or send information requests to fossil fuel companies suspected of polluting, the sources told CNN. A violation notice is a prerequisite for taking a company to court for alleged violations of environmental laws.

These instructions are on top of other administration efforts to radically reduce safeguards that protect Americans from fossil fuel-related pollution and open up more land for oil and gas drilling.

Earlier this month, for example, the EPA announced plans to eliminate Biden-era regulations limiting the amount of carbon emissions and other pollution released into the atmosphere by fossil fuel-fired power plants. CBS reported the rule the EPA seeks to revoke “is projected to reduce 1.38 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere by 2047, as well as eliminate tens of thousands of tons of other harmful air pollutants that are dangerous to public health” — an amount of pollution “equivalent to driving more than 320 million gas-powered cars for a year, according to an EPA estimate.”

The new CNN report also notes:

An early snapshot of enforcement data from Trump’s start of his second term shows the overall number of EPA enforcement cases initiated or closed across sectors has dropped by 32% compared with the first three months of the Biden administration, according to publicly available EPA data analyzed for CNN by environmental watchdog Environmental Integrity Project. The same data shows nearly 60% fewer cases have been initiated or closed compared with the first three months of Trump’s first term.

Taken together, these reductions in taxes, regulations, and enforcement for the fossil fuel industry are essentially what Trump promised to deliver for Big Oil in exchange for backing his 2024 campaign.

At the time, The Atlantic’s David A. Graham described the proposition as “undeniably scandalous.” Now that these gifts to Big Oil are being delivered, TV networks should inform their audience about the dirty “deal” between Trump and Big Oil playing out at the expense of the booming clean energy industry, our health, and our climate.

### National TV news, with the exception of MSNBC, failed to cover Trump's scandalous Big Oil proposition

05/14/24 5:01 PM EDT

### Trump's corrupt offer to Big Oil executives almost entirely ignored in top local newspapers and TV markets in battleground states

05/17/24 2:58 PM EDT

### Alex Jones says he's “very, very sad” about Trump's “big, big mistake” in striking Iran

06/23/25

---

Trump Pardoned Tax Cheat After Mother Attended $1 ...

The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com › U.S. › Politics](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/27/us/politics/trump-pardon-paul-walczak-tax-crimes.html)

1 day ago — Trump Pardoned Tax Cheat After Mother Attended $1 Million Dinner. Paul Walczak's pardon application cited his mother's support for the ...

[### Trump Pardons Paul Walczak After Mother Attends ...

Rolling Stone

https://www.rollingstone.com › politics › politics-news](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-pardons-paul-walczak-mother-fundraiser-1235348794/)

23 hours ago — Donald Trump pardoned tax criminal Paul Walczak weeks after his mother attended a lavish fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, The New York Times ...

[### Trump Pardoned Tax Cheat After Mom Attended $1M Mar- ...

The Daily Beast

https://www.thedailybeast.com › trump-pardoned-tax-ch...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-pardoned-tax-cheat-after-mom-attended-1m-mar-a-lago-dinner/)

1 day ago — His release from prison came three weeks after his Republican donor mother, Elizabeth Fago, attended a $1 million-per-head fundraising dinner, ...

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an 4 25

Analysts accuse big U.S. tech firms of paying almost $278 billion less corporate income tax in the past decade compared with the statutory rate for U.S. companies making the same profits.

The Guardian reveals Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Netflix, Apple and Microsoft —the “Silicon Six”— generated a combined $11 trillion in revenue and $2.5 trillion in profits over the last decade. But they paid an average of just 18.8% in combined national and federal corporation taxes, compared with an average 29.7% in the U.S., according to the Fair Tax Foundation (FTF).

“Our analysis would indicate that tax avoidance continues to be hardwired into corporate structures,” Fair Tax Foundation Chief Executive Paul Monaghan told The Guardian. “The Silicon Six’s corporate income tax contributions are, in percentage terms, way below what sectors such as banking and energy are paying in many parts of the world.”

Analysis at FTF also discovered the companies had inflated their stated tax payments by $82 billion over the same period by including contingencies for tax they did not expect to pay. Monaghan added that these companies have "enormous political influence as well as economic power," in that they all spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying government officials on key tax-writing committees to have more say in how the tax system works.

IFrame Content

The Guardian reports that Netflix had the lowest rate of tax actually paid compared to profit at 14.7%, while Microsoft paid 20.4%. Amazon, meanwhile, had the worst tax conduct based on factors such as the total amount of tax paid, much if it through “obvious profit shifting” such as booking a sizeable portion of its U.K. income in low-tax Luxembourg. But Amazon’s corporate tax rate was still 19.6% ahead of Netflix and Meta (15.4%) and Apple (18.4%).

The report comes as leaders of many of these same tech companies’ influence genuflect to President Donald Trump. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg all attended Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

Read the full Guardian story at this link.

:{:{---}:

an 4 25

Many of President Donald Trump's, from Fox News to Newsmax TV and One America News (OAN), are echoing his claim that Americans can expect "the biggest tax cut in history" during his second term. But Trump's detractors are countering that his economic plan will mainly benefit the richest of the rich — while causing considerable hardship to the middle class and the poor.

Some economists, in fact, are even worried that Trump's tariffs will cause "stagflation," a painful combination of inflation, unemployment and poor economic growth. Stagflation played a major role in President Jimmy Carter's landslide defeat in 1980 and persisted during President Ronald Reagan's first few years in office.

In an article published on April 12, Salon's Russell Payne offers some reasons why Trump's critics are worried about what lies ahead for the middle class and the poor.

One of those critics is Elizabeth Pancotti, managing director for the Groundwork Collective and a former adviser to progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).

IFrame Content

Pancotti described the Trump/GOP economic plan as a "triple whammy of massive redistribution in a society that is already tilted toward the wealthy," telling Salon, "The end goal here is to redistribute trillions of dollars from the middle and working class at the bottom to the one percent and the wealthy folks. They're doing that in three different ways."

According to Pancotti, those three different ways are tariffs, tax cuts from the ultra-wealth, and major cuts to safety-net programs like Medicaid.

Payne explains, "Tariffs, Pancotti said, are a regressive tax that disproportionately impacts lower earners because, in essence, a tariff is a sales tax on imported goods. Because lower-income Americans spend a larger proportion of their income on goods, they will also spend a larger proportion of their income paying the tariffs on affected goods. At the same time, Pacotti said, the Trump tax cuts, which Republicans were planning to extend, were skewed to benefit the wealthiest Americans…. The Yale Budget Lab estimated that Trump's tariff plan will likely cost the average American household around $4689 a year — a sum that eclipses the tax cut that most households received in the GOP's budget plan while only being about 8 percent of the average tax cut the wealthiest households received"

According to Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, cuts to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) staff will make it easier for the ultra-rich to dodge taxes.

Baker told Salon, "Most of us have our tax deducted from our wages. We don't have much choice in the matter. So you both have, you know, the legislative changes that reduce their tax liability, but also, you know the fact of change is that if you don't have much by way of enforcement, you have a lot of people that don't pay their taxes."

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AN 2 25

House Republicans advanced their budget plan out of committee Thursday night after a 12-hour markup session during which they rejected dozens of Democratic amendments, including proposed changes that would have protected Medicaid and federal nutrition benefits from the deep cuts the GOP hopes to impose to help finance trillions of dollars in tax breaks for the richest Americans.

The House Budget Committee advanced the Republican resolution, unveiled earlier this week, in a 21-16 vote along party lines. Prior to the vote, GOP members agreed to adopt an amendment offered by Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.) that, according toPolitico, effectively caps "the cost of the tax cuts at $4 trillion, with a dollar-for-dollar increase in that ceiling if Republicans cut more spending, up to a total of $2 trillion in cuts."

Democrats on the panel offered more than 30 amendments to the budget resolution, all of which Republicans rejected.

"Each of our amendments was a direct effort to shield the American people from the reckless cuts embedded in this proposal, cuts that will hurt the most vulnerable while giving trillions of dollars of handouts to the ultra-rich," Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said in his closing remarks at Thursday's hearing. "We fought to protect Medicaid and Medicare, ensuring that seniors, low-income families, children, and people with disabilities don't see their healthcare stripped away."

"We proposed amendments to maintain funding for public education, ensuring that schools remain adequately resourced and that teachers don't bear the burden of budget shortfalls," Boyle continued. "And we stood up for veterans who risked their lives for this country and deserve more than empty rhetoric. They deserve fully funded healthcare, food assistance, and the benefits they earned through their service. Yet, despite the clear benefits of these proposals, Republicans oppose all of them."

"Instead of choosing to protect the American people," he added, "they chose to protect billionaires and corporations."

"This isn't government of, by, and for the people; it's government of, by, and for billionaires."

The Republican budget blueprint calls for more than a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provide healthcare and food aid to tens of millions of low-income Americans.

"These aren't just numbers," Sharon Parrott, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, stressed in response to the House GOP resolution. "The loss of Medicaid means, for example, a parent can't get cancer treatment, and a young adult can't get insulin to control their diabetes. Cuts to food assistance mean a parent skips meals so their children can eat or an older person who lost their job has no way to buy groceries."

In addition to advancing the GOP's far-right ideological project, such cuts would partly offset the costs of Republicans' proposed tax breaks—which would disproportionately benefit the wealthiest people in the country, including the billionaires in President Donald Trump's Cabinet.

"Republicans are cutting Medicaid and SNAP to pay for tax breaks for the richest 1% of Americans," the progressive advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness wrote in a social media post on Thursday. "They are literally taking $1.1 TRILLION away from you, and giving it to the wealthiest people in the country."

IFrame Content

Thursday's vote marks a first step toward passage of a sprawling, filibuster-proof budget reconciliation package that will include a slew of Republican priorities.

But the House GOP must resolve its differences with Senate Republicans, who are pushing for two bills instead of one. The Senate plan, which Republicans advanced out of committee earlier this week, also calls for major cuts to Medicaid and SNAP.

"This Republican budget opens the door to massive cuts for families," Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, said Thursday. "Democrats on the committee offered amendment after amendment to protect healthcare, housing, and education—all of the foundations working families need to thrive—and Republicans blocked every single one of them, all to later divert those cuts into massive tax breaks for the richest Americans."

"This is the Great Betrayal," Merkley added. "Trump campaigned on protecting families, but President Trump and Senate Republicans are all about protecting their billionaire friends. This isn't government of, by, and for the people; it's government of, by, and for billionaires."

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AN PRO P 3 25

Dave Nershi was finalizing a report he’d worked on for months when an ominous email appeared in his inbox.

Nershi had worked as a general engineer for the Internal Revenue Service for about nine months. He was one of hundreds of specialists inside the IRS who used their technical expertise — Nershi’s background is in chemical and nuclear engineering — to audit byzantine tax returns filed by large corporations and wealthy individuals. Until recently, the IRS had a shortage of these experts, and many complex tax returns went unscrutinized. With the help of people like Nershi, the IRS could recoup millions and sometimes more than a billion dollars on a single tax return.

But on Feb. 20, three months shy of finishing his probationary period and becoming a full-time employee, the IRS fired him. As a Navy veteran, Nershi loved working in public service and had hoped he might be spared from any mass firings. The unsigned email said he’d been fired for performance, even though he had received high marks from his manager.

As for the report he was finalizing, it would have probably recouped many times more than the low-six-figure salary he earned. The report would now go unfinished.

Nershi agreed that the federal government could be more lean and efficient, but he was befuddled by the decision to fire scores of highly skilled IRS specialists like him who, even by the logic of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, were an asset to the government. “By firing us, you’re going to cut down on how much revenue the country brings in,” Nershi said in an interview. “This was not about saving money.”

Since taking office, President Donald Trump and his billionaire top adviser Musk have launched an all-out blitz to cut costs and shrink the federal government. Trump, Musk and other administration leaders not only say the U.S. government is bloated and inefficient, but they also see it as a bastion of political opposition, calling it the “deep state.”

The strategy used by the Trump administration to reduce the size of government has been indiscriminate and far-reaching, meant to oust civil servants as fast as possible in as many agencies as possible while demoralizing the workers that remain on the job. As Russell Vought, director of the Trump White House’s Office of Management and Budget and an architect of Project 2025, put it in a speech first reported by ProPublica and Documented: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

One tactic used by the administration is to target probationary workers who are easier to fire because they have fewer civil service protections. Probationary, in this context, means only that the employees are new to their roles, not that they’re newbies or underperformers. ProPublica found that the latest IRS firings swept up highly skilled and experienced probationary workers who had recently joined the government or had moved to a new position from a different agency.

In late February, the Trump administration began firing more than 6,000 IRS employees. The agency has been hit especially hard, current and former employees said, because it spent 2023 preparing to hire thousands of new enforcement and customer service personnel and had only started hiring and training those workers at any scale in 2024, meaning many of those new employees were still in their probationary period. Nershi was hired as part of this wave, in the spring of last year. The boost came after Congress had underfunded the agency for much of the past decade, which led to chronic staffing shortages, dismal customer service and plummeting audit rates, especially for taxpayers who earned $500,000 or more a year.

The administration doesn’t appear to want to stop there. It is drafting plans to cut its entire workforce in half, according to reports.

Unlike with other federal agencies, cutting the IRS means the government collects less money and finds fewer tax abuses. Economic studies have shown that for every dollar spent by the IRS, the agency returns between $5 and $12, depending on how much income the taxpayer declared. A 2024 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the IRS found savings of $13,000 for every additional hour spent auditing the tax returns of very wealthy taxpayers — a return on investment that “would leave Wall Street hedge fund managers drooling,” in the words of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

John Koskinen, who led the IRS from 2013 to 2017, said in an interview that the widespread cuts to the IRS make no sense if Trump and Musk genuinely care about fiscal responsibility and rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. “What I’ve never understood is if you’re interested in the deficit and curbing it, why would you cut back on the revenue side?” Koskinen said.

Neither the IRS nor the White House responded to requests for comment. Last month, Musk asked his followers on X, the platform he owns, whether they would “like @DOGE to audit the IRS,” referring to the U.S. DOGE Service team of lawyers and engineers led by him. DOGE employees have sought to gain access to IRS taxpayer data in an attempt to “shine a light on the fraud,” according to a White House spokesman.

For this story, ProPublica interviewed more than a dozen current and former IRS employees. Most of those people worked in the agency’s Large Business and International (LB&I) division, which audits companies with more than $10 million in assets and high-income individuals. Within the IRS, the LB&I division has the highest return on investment, and the widespread cuts there put in stark relief the human and financial cost of the Trump administration’s approach to slashing government functions in the name of saving money and combating waste and fraud.

According to current and former LB&I employees, the taxpayers they audited included pharmaceutical companies, oil and gas companies, construction firms and major technology corporations, as well as more obscure private corporations and high-net-worth individuals. None of the IRS employees who spoke to ProPublica would disclose specific taxpayer information, citing privacy laws.

With the recent influx in funding, employees said, the leadership of LB&I had pushed to hire not only more revenue agents and appraisers but also specialized employees such as petroleum engineers, computer scientists and experts in corporate partnerships. These employees, usually known internally as general engineers, consulted on complicated tax returns and helped determine whether taxpayers properly claimed certain credits or other tax breaks.

This work happened in cases where major companies claimed a hefty research tax credit, which is a legitimate avenue for seeking tax relief but can also be improperly used. Highly skilled appraisers have also recouped huge savings in cases involving notorious tax schemes, such as what’s known as a syndicated conservation easement — a break abused so often that both congressional Democrats and Republicans have criticized it, while the IRS has included it on its list of the “Dirty Dozen” tax scams.

“These are cases where revenue agents don't have the technical expertise,” said one IRS engineer who is still employed at the agency and who, like other IRS employees, wasn’t authorized to speak to the media. “That’s what we do. We are working on things where expertise is absolutely necessary.”

Current and former IRS employees told ProPublica that the agency had expended a huge amount of resources to recruit and train new specialists in recent years. Vanessa Rollins, an engineer in the IRS’ Chicago office who was recently fired, said probationary employees in LB&I outnumbered full-time staffers in her office. Much of her team’s work centered on training and mentorship for the waves of new employees — most of whom were recently fired. “The entire office had been oriented around bringing us in and getting us trained,” Rollins said.

These specialists said they earned higher salaries compared with many other IRS employees. But the money these specialists recouped as a result of their work was orders of magnitude greater than what they cost. The current engineer told ProPublica that they estimated their team of less than 10 people had brought in $5 billion in adjusted tax returns over the past four years. (By contrast, a Wall Street Journal analysis published on Feb. 22 found that DOGE had found savings of $2.6 billion over the next year, far less than the $55 billion claimed by DOGE itself.)

A former LB&I revenue agent added that their work didn’t always lead to the IRS recouping money from a taxpayer; sometimes, they audited a return only to find that the taxpayer was owed more money than they had expected.

“The IRS’ mission is to treat taxpayers fairly so they pay the tax they legally owe, including making sure they’re not paying any more than legally required,” the former revenue agent said.

Notwithstanding its return on investment and the sense of duty espoused by its employees, LB&I was hit especially hard by the most recent wave of firings, employees said. According to the current IRS engineer, the Trump administration appears to have eliminated the jobs of about 120 LB&I engineers out of a total of roughly 260. The person said they had heard more terminations were expected soon. The acting IRS chief and a longtime agency leader, Doug O’Donnell, announced his retirement amid the firings.

Several LB&I employees told ProPublica that the mass layoffs had been ordered from a very high level and that several layers of managers had no idea they were coming or what to expect. The cuts, employees said, did not appear to distinguish between employees with certain specialties or performance levels, but instead focused solely on whether they were on probationary status. “It didn't matter the skill set. If they were under a year, they got cut,” another current LB&I employee told ProPublica.

The current and former IRS employees said the firings and the administration’s deferred resignation offer led to situations that have wiped out decades of experience and institutional knowledge that can’t easily be replaced. Jack McCumber was an LB&I senior appraiser in Seattle who got fired about six weeks before the end of his probationary status. He said not only did he lose his job, but the veteran appraiser who was his mentor took early retirement. McCumber and his mentor often worked on syndicated conservative easement cases that could recoup tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars. “They’re pushing out the experienced people, and they’re pushing out people like me,” McCumber said. “It’s a double whammy.”

The result, employees and experts said, will mean corporations and wealthy individuals face far less scrutiny when they file their tax returns, leading to more risk-taking and less money flowing into the U.S. treasury.

“Large businesses and higher-wealth individuals are where you have the most sophisticated taxpayers and the most sophisticated tax preparers and lawyers who are attuned to pushing the envelope as much as they can,” said Koskinen, the former IRS commissioner. “When those audits stop because there isn't anybody to do them, people will say, ‘Hey, I did that last year, I'll do it again this year.’”

“When you hamstring the IRS,” Koskinen added. “it’s just a tax cut for tax cheats.”

REF 1

Dirty Dozen: Beware of abusive tax avoidance schemes | Internal Revenue Service

...Syndicated conservation easements

A conservation easement is a restriction on the use of real property. Generally, taxpayers may claim a charitable contribution deduction for the fair market value of a conservation easement transferred to a charity if the transfer meets the requirements of Internal Revenue Code section 170.

Syndicated conservation easements are arrangements that make the Dirty Dozen list again in 2023. In abusive arrangements, promoters are syndicating conservation easement transactions that purport to give an investor the opportunity to claim charitable contribution deductions and corresponding tax savings that significantly exceed the amount the investor invested. These abusive arrangements, which generate high fees for promoters, attempt to game the tax system with grossly inflated tax deductions.

As part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, Congress amended section 170 to curb certain abusive conservation easement transactions. The IRS is committed to ensuring compliance with the conservation easement deduction law as amended in the 2023 legislation and will continue to scrutinize transactions that are "too good to be true."

...

RWEF 2 PPUB

Syndicated Conservation Easements: The Tax Scam That Won’t Die — ProPublica

...

A bipartisan group of influential lawmakers has tried. Democrat Wyden and Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, the finance committee’s ranking Republican, jointly released a 151-page investigative report in 2020 that referred to syndicated easements as a “dollar machine” for wealthy taxpayers. “You simply insert the dollar bill and then watch the Dollar Machine return two dollar bills to you,” the report explained. “But it was not the promoters who gave back the two dollars; it was the Federal government by way of foregone tax revenue, and the only risk involved was whether or not the transaction would lead to an audit.”

Others looking to rein in syndicated deals include Montana Republican Sen. Steve Daines, Michigan Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow and House members Mike Thompson, a California Democrat, and Mike Kelly, a Pennsylvania Republican. Together, several of these lawmakers introduced the Charitable Conservation Easement Program Integrity Act of 2017 — and have reintroduced it, in updated form, in one congressional chamber or the other, eight times since, most recently a year ago.

The legislation aims to put an end to syndicated deals by eliminating their profitability, with a bar on taxpayers claiming easement deductions that exceed 2.5 times their investments. Closing this loophole would generate $12 billion in additional tax revenue through 2027, according to the Office of Management and Budget. But the legislation has never gotten far — and lawmakers say that’s no accident.

Since 2017, syndicators have spent $11 million on lobbyists, according to publicly filed lobbying disclosures. P4C has paid for more than $6 million of that. EcoVest Capital, a big promoter based in Atlanta that is now facing a Justice Department civil fraud suit, has spent $3.3 million. (By contrast, the Land Trust Alliance has spent $2.4 million on lobbyists during the same time period.)

While recruiting congressional allies to block the Easement Program Integrity Act, syndication advocates have also gone on the attack, pressing Congress (unsuccessfully, so far) to strip the IRS of funds used to enforce the agency’s 2017 listing notice that flags profit-making syndicated deals as abusive and requires participants to report their involvement.

Syndication promoters have actively courted Democratic support, adding Waxman Strategies, a self-described “progressive-minded public affairs firm” chaired by Henry Waxman, 82, the liberal former California representative, to their lineup of heavyweight lobbyists. In April 2018, P4C founder Frank Schuler, whose Atlanta firm was then one of the most prolific promoters, advised top executives at EcoVest about the move. “P4C is about to get the Waxman group underway to work on the D side of things,” Schuler wrote, in an email disclosed in court filings. “They really believe in what we are doing and that was a condition of Waxman’s to undertake the engagement. This is another $23k per month but we are in the thick of the fight and now is the time.”

Since then, Waxman Strategies has earned $485,000 for representing syndicators, with the former congressional representative working on the issue along with others at the firm. “Partnership style conservation easements are an important tool for conserving land that is under development pressure,” Michael Goo, the firm’s managing director and a former staff director for a House environmental subcommittee, told ProPublica in a written response to questions sent to Henry Waxman. “We believe they can be used to mobilize private capital into conserving land that in fact would be developed sooner or later.” The reform legislation, he added, “would effectively remove the incentive for investors to mobilize private capital into conservation easements.”

Unable to move their Easement Program Integrity Act through a divided Congress, supporters managed late last year to get its language included in the “Build Back Better” provisions passed by the House Ways and Means Committee. This raised hopes that it could get enacted along with the spending measure, which would require just a majority vote in the Senate.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the enigmatic Arizona Democrat, who represented a potentially decisive vote in her 50-50 chamber, put an end to that, telling the White House the syndication-killer language was among the provisions she wanted out of the bill, according to press reports. It was removed. That prompted 13 conservation groups to write Sinema on Dec. 7, pleading with her to “stand with us” to “curb abuse and restore the integrity of this cherished and worthy conservation program.”

Sinema, whose objections to the measure remain unclear, was unmoved. “All efforts to persuade the AZ Senator to reconsider her position have failed,” one advocate for the measure told ProPublica in an email. (Sinema’s staff did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.)

Since then, President Joe Biden, signaling his support, has included the measure in his proposed 2023 budget in a section entitled “close loopholes.” But it remains far from enactment.

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GOP proposes repealing Biden’s student debt relief to fund new tax cuts for the rich

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truthout 12 24

after the hottest summer in recorded human history — along with Hurricanes Helene and Milton, flooding and wildfires — why isn’t there a greater push for action on climate change?

One reason is that big oil, gas and coal companies — and their allies in Congress — block the urgent action that’s required. They do this in part by denying basic climate science, and in many cases, they receive enormous,publicly subsidizedtax benefits to do it. And in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, millions in charitable donations poured into policy development at the Heritage Foundation, producing the Project 2025 Blueprint for the incoming Trump administration.

It’s true. Wealthy donors and fossil fuel corporations regularly make “charitable” donations to nonprofit organizations that deny science, sow doubt about the urgency of climate change and run out the clock for timely action. When they deduct those contributions from their tax bill, they’re effectively being subsidized by you — the taxpayer.

Many of these donors have built their fortunes in the oil, coal and gas industries or in the industries that support them, like banking and insurance. They have a vested interest in ensuring the world’s ongoing dependence on fossil fuels. These include the Koch family of private energy giant Koch Industries, and the Scaife family, heirs to the Mellon oil and banking fortune.

Here’s how it works, according to a new report I’ve co-authored for the Institute for Policy Studies and Climate Accountability Research Project: Through U.S. charitable giving tax laws, donors like the Kochs and Scaifes reduce their taxes when they give to qualified, tax-exempt nonprofit charities. The wealthier the donor, the greater the reduction in their tax bill. Byone estimate, for every dollar a billionaire gives to charity, taxpayers chip in up to 74 cents in lost tax revenue.

...

A US nonprofit funnels money from billionaires like Home Depot’s co-founder to effectively subsidize Israeli troops.

By Derek Seidman , TruthoutDecember 2, 2024

> From 2020 to 2022, U.S. nonprofits that deny basic climate science received $5.8 billion in tax-deductible donations.

Our report identified 137 nonprofit tax-exempt organizations that actively spread climate disinformation, working effectively to confound public opinion and delay urgent action on climate.

For example, theCompetitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) received $21 million in charitable contributions from 2020 to 2022. CEI boasts that it’s been “instrumental” in stalling climate action, both in blocking ratification of the 1997Kyoto Protocol and in pressuring former (and now incoming) President Donald Trump to withdraw from the 2016Paris Climate Agreement.

In 2013, Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University in Pennsylvania,predicted that $500 million was given to organizations devoted to undermining the science of climate change. We estimate that figure has risen into the billions: Over three years, from 2020 to 2022, U.S. nonprofits that deny basic climate science received $5.8 billion in tax-deductible donations. Some $219 million went to groups that primarily work on climate disinformation.

The rest went to multi-issue organizations that include climate denial as part of their work — groups like The Heritage Foundation, which developed the extremist Project 2025 blueprint that would, among other things, roll back environmental regulations and cancel billions of dollars’ worth of investments in green jobs. Other recommendations from Project 2025 include the elimination of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (OCAA).

Conservatively, we estimate that somewhere between $219 million and $1 billion flowed directly to climate disinformation, all subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, during our study period between 2020 and 2022.

Even though these are effectively our tax dollars at work, we don’t know the precise figure. That’s because many donors give through vehicles called donor-advised funds (DAFs), which mask the identity of donors and their recipient organizations. Roughly 16 percent of all donations to climate disinformation groups come through DAFs. Many billions more may have come through private individual donations as well.

If we want to save the planet, we need transparency reforms to reveal this web of secret donations.

The fossil fuel industry has harnessed our charitable system for their self-serving, harmful disinformation campaigns — and they do it largely in secret. We know the oil, gas and coal industry has been funding disinformation for almost half a century, even as their own internal research documented the harms from carbon and methane emissions. So what can we do about it? One simple step is to improve transparency, so the public has more accurate information about where these taxpayer-subsidized donations are going.

Currently, DAF sponsoring organizations — like Schwab Charitable or Fidelity Charitable — are only required to disclose total grants to nonprofits from their sponsoring fund, not from each DAF account, so we don’t know the individual donor who gave the funds. Our report urges lawmakers to pass legislation to require grants from DAFs to be reported on an individual account basis.

We’re also calling to close another DAF loophole. Private charitable foundations, which are required by law to distribute 5 percent of their assets each year, are increasingly giving funds to DAFs and counting that toward their payout requirements. That loophole, which can conceal the actual grant recipients, should be closed.

U.S. taxpayers are likely subsidizing billions of dollars of donations to climate misinformation organizations. If we want to save the planet, we need transparency reforms to reveal this web of secret donations.

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an 12 24

At least 27 House Republicans are urging President-elect Donald Trump to end the Internal Revenue Service's Direct File program as soon as he returns to the White House and begins his second term. But Direct File also has plenty of supporters, including MSNBC's Hayes Brown.

In an opinion column published on December 15, Brown argues that House Republicans have a motivation for wanting to abolish Direct File: making it more "painful" for Americans to file their taxes.

"In the fall of 2023, the Internal Revenue Service announced a pilot program that would allow some Americans to file their taxes directly to the agency — for free," Brown explains. "The Direct File service managed to go against at least a half-dozen federal government stereotypes: it was new and novel in a system that loathes change, it allowed people to be more efficient with their time, and the people who used it this past tax season had plenty of good things to say about their experience."

READ MORE:[New Kristi Noem proposal would fund Christian ‘segregation academies’

Brown adds, "In May, the IRS said the program would be expanded and made permanent. But of course, there are Republicans who would like nothing more than to strangle a popular government initiative in its cradle."

According to Brown, House Republicans who oppose Direct File believe that abolishing the program will make it easier for their party to carry out tax cuts for wealthy Americans.

"The more friction in the system, the more visible of a target the IRS becomes for average Americans," Brown explains. "The more people who are frustrated with the IRS, the better their case for cutting even more taxes for the wealthy. It also doesn't hurt to be in the good graces of massive tax preparation companies like Intuit, which have spent years and millions of dollars to ensure that filing taxes is as painful a process as possible. Among the reforms they blocked was a plan to go further than Direct File, letting many taxpayers file pre-populated forms for free."

Brown continues, "The net effect is that there's no upside to murdering Direct File ahead of tax season beyond making the federal government less responsive and useful in the eyes of Americans. Republicans can falsely claim that they're trying to save taxpayers' money from the clutches of the IRS. It's clear what they're really trying to claw back is a massive refund of Americans’ time and energy in the name of making everything a little bit worse."

READ MORE:['Trump ’28': Bannon calls for third term

*Hayes Brown's full MSNBC opinion column is available at this link.

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no lnx

:{alternet

US plutocrats $276 billion richer since Trump win—and the GOP wants to give them even more

Elon Musk attends the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) gala at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 14, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Jake Johnson and Common Dreams November 22, 2024

An analysis released Wednesday showed that the United States' 815 billionaires have seen their combined wealth surge by roughly $280 billion since Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 presidential election earlier this month, a finding that came as Republicans continued to lay the groundwork for another massive tax giveaway for the rich.

Citing Forbes data, Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) noted that the collective net worth of the nation's billionaires jumped $276 billion between November 4—the day before Election Day—and November 12. Elon Musk, the world's wealthiest man and a Trump confidant, accounted for 20% of the total billionaire wealth surge, with his net worth growing by $57 billion in just a week.

ATF found that U.S. billionaire wealth is now at an all-time high of $6.7 trillion—a fact that hasn't deterred Republican lawmakers from pursuing additional tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, which they want to pay for in part by slashing Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance.

"Among the tax handouts the GOP hopes to offer America's plutocrats is a weakening or elimination of the estate tax, the federal government's only curb on dynastic wealth," ATF noted. "As proof of the party's intent, the new Republican majority in the U.S. Senate has chosen as its next leader the chamber's main champion of estate-tax repeal, John Thune (R-S.D.)."

The group observed that scrapping the estate tax would save billionaire households an estimated $2.7 trillion while depriving "working Americans of the exact same amount of funding for vital public services like Medicare, childcare, education, and housing."

Since the highly regressive 2017 Trump-GOP tax cut that Republicans are looking to extend and expand, U.S. billionaire wealth has risen by $3.8 trillion—over 131%—according to ATF.

"Instead of addressing the nation's growing economic inequality and the growing shortfall in federal revenue, President Trump and congressional Republicans plan to make the situation even worse by enacting a new tax cut package that gives billionaires tax breaks on the backs of working people," the group said Wednesday. "This Republican tax plan will start with extending all the expiring provisions in the 2017 Trump law—which alone will balloon the federal debt by $5 trillion over the next decade—but will likely include new handouts to the very wealthy, such as elimination of the estate tax."

During a hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) voiced similar concerns about the Trump-GOP tax agenda, which also includes cutting the statutory corporate tax rate from 21% to 15%.

"President-elect Trump has proposed making every single 2017 tax cut for the wealthy permanent," Warren said during the Senate hearing. "In fact, he plans to go further by cutting the corporate tax rate even more, so that giant corporations making record profits off struggling Americans can shovel even more cash to their rich executives and shareholders."

"The tax fight is starting now, and every person in the United States, every person in the Senate, needs to show the American people what side we stand on," said Warren. "Will we sign our names to more giveaways to President-elect Trump's billionaire buddies, or will we fight for tax fairness for the American people?"

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A study published Tuesday estimates that tax dodging enabled by the United States, the United Kingdom, and other wealthy nations is costing countries around the world nearly half a trillion dollars in revenue each year, underscoring the urgent need for global reforms to prevent rich individuals and large corporations from shirking their obligations.

The new study, conducted by the Tax Justice Network (TJN), finds that "the combined costs of cross-border tax abuse by multinational companies and by individuals with undeclared assets offshore stands at an estimated $492 billion." Of that total in lost revenue, corporate tax dodging is responsible for more than $347 billion, according to TJN's calculations.

"For people everywhere, the losses translate into foregone public services, and weakened states at greater risk of falling prey to political extremism," the study reads. "And in the same way, there is scope for all to benefit from moving tax rule-setting out of the OECD and into a globally inclusive and fully transparent process at the United Nations."

The analysis estimates that just eight countries—the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Japan, Israel, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand—are enabling large-scale tax avoidance by opposing popular global reform efforts. Late last year, those same eight countries were the lonely opponents of the United Nations General Assembly's vote to set in motion the process of establishing a U.N. tax convention.

According to the new TJN study, those eight countries are responsible for roughly half of the $492 billion lost per year globally to tax avoidance by the rich and large multinational corporations, despite being home to just 8% of the world's population.

"The hurtful eight voted for a world where we all keep losing half a trillion a year to tax-cheating multinational corporations and the super-rich," Alex Cobham, chief executive of the Tax Justice Network, said in a statement Tuesday. "The U.K. and the U.S. are both among the biggest enablers and the biggest losers of this lose-lose tax system, and their people consistently demand an end to tax abuse, so it's absurd that the U.S. and U.K. are seeking to preserve it."

"It's perhaps harder to understand why the other handful of blockers, like Australia, Canada, and Japan, who don't play anything like such a damaging role, would be willing to go along with this," Cobham added.

TJN released its study as G20 nations—a group that includes most of the "hurtful eight"—issued a communiqué pledging to "engage cooperatively to ensure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed." Brazil, which hosted the G20 summit, led the push for language calling for taxation of the global super-rich.

The document drew praise from advocacy groups including the Fight Inequality Alliance, which stressed the need to "transform the rhetoric on taxing the rich into global reality."

The communiqué was released amid concerns that the election of far-right billionaire Donald Trump in the U.S. could derail progress toward a global solution to pervasive and costly tax avoidance.

The new TJN study cites Trump's pledge to cut the statutory U.S. corporate tax rate from 21% to 15% and warns such a move would accelerate the global "race to the bottom" on corporate taxation.

"People in countries around the world are calling in large majorities on their governments to tax multinational corporations properly," Liz Nelson, TJN's director of advocacy and research, said Tuesday. "But governments continue to exercise a policy of appeasement on corporate tax."

"We now have data from these governments showing that when they asked multinational corporations to pay less tax, the corporations cheated even more," Nelson added. "It's time governments found the spines their people deserve from their leaders."

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Once upon a time, here in the United States, we taxed the rich. Significantly. Today, by contrast, we’re actively enhancing their fortunes. Including the biggest personal fortune of them all, the quarter-trillion-dollar stash that belongs to Elon Musk, the current numero uno on the Forbes'real-time list of the world’s largest fortunes.

Musk owes a hefty chunk of his own personal fortune to the taxes average Americans pay. He just happens to be, notes a just-published Politico analysis, “the single biggest beneficiary of U.S. government contracts.”

Two of Musk’s commercial operations, Tesla and SpaceX, have received billions in American taxpayer support. The federal government, Politico points out, has essentially “outsourced its space program” to SpaceX, and Tesla, a shaky electric vehicle company when Musk bought it, only “took off after receiving $465 million in subsidies from the Obama administration in 2010.”

All the tax dollars that Musk has collected from the Defense Department, NASA, and the U.S. intelligence community — coupled with the “generous government subsidies and tax credits to the electric-vehicle industry” that have so boosted Musk’s Tesla — have Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Max Boot fairly fuming.

Taxpayers like himself, Boot notes, are subsidizing the “fire hose of falsehoods” that now appear on X, the former Twitter, the social media app that Musk bought for $44 billion two years ago. Our tax dollars have essentially supersized our world’s single wealthiest individual.

Back in the middle of the 20th century, the United States took quite a different approach to the money pouring into rich people’s pockets. From the early 1940s through the mid-1960s, the incomes of America’s richest faced a tax bite that would be unimaginable today.

In 1942, then-president Franklin Roosevelt proposed a 100 percent tax rate on income over $25,000, the equivalent of about $484,000 today. Congress wouldn’t go along with that 100 percent top rate. But lawmakers did give the okay to a 94 percent top tax rate on 1944 income over $200,000.

In the 1950s, under the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, the federal tax rate on top-bracket income never dipped below 91 percent.

Today’s top-bracket federal income tax rate? That stands, on paper, at 37 percent on income over $693,751 for a couple filing jointly. But assorted loopholes have left the tax rate the rich face on their actual annual gains enormously lower.

In 2021, a joint report from the Biden administration’s Office of Management and Budget and Council of Economic Advisers calculated that America’s wealthiest 400 billionaire families, between 2010 and 2018, “paid an average of just 8.2 percent of their income” — counting the gains in the value of their investments — in federal individual income taxes.

“That’s a lower rate,” the report noted, “than many ordinary Americans pay.”

Could we ever get back to anything close to Eisenhower-era tax rates on the richest among us? This past March, the Biden administration proposed a 25 percent minimum tax on the total income — including unrealized capital gains — of the nation’s top 0.01 percent, households worth at least $100 million.

About the same time, progressive lawmakers — led by U.S. senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and representatives Pramila Jayapal from Washington State and Brendan Boyle from Pennsylvania — introduced the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, legislation that would impose a wealth tax on America’s 100,000 wealthiest households, our richest 0.05 percent.

Under this proposed legislation, wealthy households worth up to $1 billion would face an annual tax of 2 percent on their wealth over $50 million. Richer households would face an additional 1 percent tax on wealth over $1 billion.

One of the Senate co-sponsors of that legislation, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, has also gone a step further and called for a 100 percent tax on wealth over $1 billion.

“I think people can make it on $999 million,” Sanders told journalist Chris Wallace last year.

Sanders and one of America’s most famous deep pockets, Bill Gates, have actually had a friendly podcast discussion over whether our tax rates should allow billion-dollar fortunes to even exist. The Sanders proposal, noted Gates, would tax away over 99 percent of his personal fortune. Gates would be willing to let the IRS take 62 percent, about $100 billion.

For a better America, that certainly might make a good place to start.

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Ben Shapiro falsely suggests a proposed tax for households with $100 million in net worth would apply to everyone

08/21/24 mma

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an 6 24

As the 2024 election draws closer, U.S. tax policy will be among the many issues debated by Republicans and Democrats.

On Monday, June 17, the U.S. Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), CNBC reports, released a plan they say would "close a major tax loophole" and raise an estimated $50 million in tax revenue over the next ten years.

CNBC's Kate Dore reports that the plan targets "related party basis shifting," which Dore describes as a process in which "single businesses operating through different legal entities trade original purchase prices on assets to take more deductions or reduce future gains."

IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel, on June 14, told reporters, "These tax shelters allow wealthy taxpayers to avoid paying what they owe."

According to Dore, the plan would ramp up IRS efforts to increase audits for the wealthiest Americans and large corporations.

In an official statement, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said of the plan, "Treasury and the IRS are focused on addressing high-end tax abuse from all angles, and the proposed rules released today will increase tax fairness and reduce the deficit."

Similarly, Lael Brainard, a White House National Economic Council advisor, said, "We should ensure ultra-wealthy taxpayers pay what they owe and play by the same rules by maintaining the president's investment in the IRS."

*Read CNBC's full report at this link.

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an 5 24

a n analysis published Friday by the renowned economist Gabriel Zucman shows that in 2018, U.S. billionaires paid a lower effective tax rate than working-class Americans for the first time in the nation's history, a data point that sparked a new flurry of calls for bold levies on the ultra-rich.

Published in The New York Times with the headline "It's Time to Tax the Billionaires," Zucman's analysis notes that billionaires pay so little in taxes relative to their vast fortunes because they "live off their wealth"—mostly in the form of stock holdings—rather than wages and salaries.

Stock gains aren't currently taxed in the U.S. until the underlying asset is sold, leaving billionaires like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk—a pair frequently competing to be the single richest man on the planet—with very little taxable income.

"But they can still make eye-popping purchases by borrowing against their assets," Zucman noted. "Mr. Musk, for example, used his shares in Tesla as collateral to rustle up around $13 billion in tax-free loans to put toward his acquisition of Twitter."

To begin reversing the decades-long trend of surging inequality that has weakened democratic institutions and undermined critical programs such as Social Security, Zucman made the case for a minimum tax on billionaires in the U.S. and around the world.

"The idea that billionaires should pay a minimum amount of income tax is not a radical idea," Zucman wrote Friday. "What is radical is continuing to allow the wealthiest people in the world to pay a smaller percentage in income tax than nearly everybody else. In liberal democracies, a wave of political sentiment is building, focused on rooting out the inequality that corrodes societies. A coordinated minimum tax on the super-rich will not fix capitalism. But it is a necessary first step."

Responding to those who claim a minimum tax would be impractical because "wealth is difficult to value," Zucman wrote that "this fear is overblown."

"According to my research, about 60% of U.S. billionaires' wealth is in stocks of publicly traded companies," the economist observed. "The rest is mostly ownership stakes in private businesses, which can be assigned a monetary value by looking at how the market values similar firms."

Since 2018, the final year examined in Zucman's analysis, the wealth of global billionaires has continued to explode while worker pay has been largely stagnant. As of last month, there were a record 2,781 billionaires worldwide with combined assets of $14.2 trillion.

The U.S. has more billionaires than any other country, with 813 individuals worth a combined $5.7 trillion.

"The ultra-wealthy are paying less in taxes than the bottom half of income earners. That's absurd!" Rakeen Mabud, chief economist at the Groundwork Collaborative, wrote in response to Zucman's analysis. "We've got to raise taxes on the wealthy and large corporations. Enough with the wealth hoarding. It's past time for us to take back what's ours."

U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), chair of the Senate Budget Committee, called the figures assembled by Zucman "disgraceful" and said that "not only can we fix this, we can make Social Security and Medicare safe and sound as far as the eye can see."

AN 3 24

alternet no lnx 3 24

Exposed: 35 corporations that pay their execs more than they pay in taxes

Jake Johnson and Common Dreams

March 13, 2024

Top executives at dozens of major, profitable U.S. businesses received more in total compensation in recent years than their companies paid in federal taxes, underscoring the twin outrages of skyrocketing CEO pay and rampant corporate tax dodging.

A report published Wednesday by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) identifies 35 profitable U.S. corporations that paid their top executives more than they paid the federal government in taxes between 2018 and 2022. The list of companies includes Ford, Netflix, NextEra Energy, and Tesla—whose CEO, Elon Musk, is the second richest man in the world.

ATF and IPS found 64 companies that paid their top five executives more than they paid in taxes in at least two of the five years examined.

Tesla, which has received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal subsidies and loans, paid nothing in federal taxes during the period examined by the new report, as the electric car company carried forward losses from previous years to offset the $4.4 billion in U.S. profits it made between 2018 and 2022—the first five years of the Trump-GOP tax law that slashed rates for the rich and corporations.

Additionally, the report points to Tesla's apparent use of "accounting schemes" such as "shifting American profits to offshore tax havens."

Meanwhile, in 2018, Tesla's board gave Musk a staggering $2.28 billion pay package, which was at the time "the largest compensation plan in public corporate history." (In 2021, the ratio of Musk's compensation and that of the median Tesla employee was roughly 18,000 to 1.)

"In the intervening years, with the rise in the price of Tesla shares, the value of those options has grown to an eye-watering $56 billion. It became so outlandish as compensation for a single individual that a court in corporate-friendly Delaware struck it down," the new report notes. "Even if that decision survives appeal, whatever Tesla winds up paying Musk will still be more than it pays Uncle Sam."

The other profitable companies that paid their top executives more than they paid in taxes during the five-year study period were T-Mobile, American International Group, Duke Energy, DISH Network, Principal Financial, Metlife, American Electric Power, Kinder Morgan, Dominion Energy, Oneok, Williams, Xcel Energy, FirstEnergy, NRG Energy, Salesforce, DTE Energy, Ameren, Sempra Energy, United States Steel, Entergy, AmerisourceBergen, PPL, CMS Energy, Evergy, Voya Financial, Darden Restaurants, Atmos Energy, Alliant Energy, Match Group, UGI, and Agilent Technologies.

"America's working families are cheated twice when major corporations pay too little to the federal government in taxes while paying too much to their top executives."

The new report argues it is "no coincidence" that companies notorious for paying little to nothing in federal taxes despite massive profits also grant their executives huge pay packages.

"Executives are rewarded for 'tax efficiency'—the euphemism for corporate tax dodging—which is often an easier way to raise profits than by creating goods and services more customers want to buy," the report notes. "And compliant corporate boards have more money to throw around the executive suite when their firms pay less in taxes."

CEOs are often able to make use of so-called "top hat" plans that allow them to set aside unlimited sums, tax-free, for retirement.

David Kass, ATF's executive director, said that "both kinds of corporate misbehavior—underpaying taxes and overpaying executives—ultimately make working families the victim through smaller paychecks and diminished public services."

Thanks to cuts to the corporate tax rate and persistent loopholes, the effective U.S. corporate tax rate has declined sharply in recent decades, falling from around 50% in the 1950s to 17% in 2022—depriving the government of revenue that could be used for key domestic priorities, from healthcare to housing to environmental protection.

"America's working families are cheated twice when major corporations pay too little to the federal government in taxes while paying too much to their top executives in lavish compensation packages," the study argues.

The report estimates that hiking the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% would bring in $1.3 trillion in federal revenue over the next decade.

ATF and IPS also point to the "wealth of proposals" in Congress aimed at reining in out-of-control CEO pay. Earlier this year, progressive lawmakers in the House and Senate introduced legislation that would hike taxes on corporations that pay their top executives over 50 times more than their median workers.

The bill's supporters estimate that it could raise up to $150 billion over 10 years.

"For corporations to reward a handful of top executives more than they are contributing to the cost of all the public services needed for our economy to thrive reflects the deep flaws in our public regulation of corporations," said ATF and IPS. "Rather than more tax breaks, Congress should focus on addressing these deficiencies by cracking down on the use of tax havens, eliminating wasteful corporate subsidies, and closing loopholes that further enrich wealthy corporate executives."

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series: The Secret IRS Files

Inside the Tax Records of the .001%

Flying to Ireland to inhale the seaside air as you drive a golf ball into the scenic distance. Crossing the country to reach your enormous yacht, which is ready for your Hudson River pleasure cruise. Hosting a governor’s wife on your very own aircraft. These are only a few of the joys that the richest Americans have experienced in recent years through their private jets. And what made them all the sweeter is that they came with a tax write-off.

Over the past two years, ProPublica has documented the many ways that the ultrawealthy avoid taxes. The biggest or most daring maneuvers scale in the billions of dollars, and while the tax deductibility of private jets isn’t the most important feature of U.S. tax law, the fact that billionaires’ luxury rides come with millions in tax savings says a lot about how the system really works.

There are dozens of examples of wealthy Americans taking these sorts of deductions, which are premised on the notion that the planes are used mainly for business, in the massive trove of tax records that have formed the basis for ProPublica’s “Secret IRS Files” series. The ultrawealthy, however, can easily blur business and pleasure. And when they purport to make their planes available for leasing, to fulfill one definition of using the planes for business, they tend to be more adept at generating tax deductions than revenue.

Tony Alvarez and Bryan Marsal built a successful consulting firm specializing in restructuring — advising struggling or bankrupt companies on what to sell and whom to lay off. It can be a grim business: Marsal has been known to announce to prone firms that they were now a “community of pain.” But the partners, who are also close friends, own another enterprise, the Hogs Head Golf Club (“Built by Friends, for Friends, for Fun”), on the southwest coast of Ireland. It boasts views of the nearby mountains and bay.

In 2016, before opening their new course, the pair teamed up, via an LLC they named after their golf club, to buy a 2001 Gulfstream IV jet. The next year, President Donald Trump signed his big tax cut into law. It made buying a plane even more attractive: The full price of the plane could be deducted in the first year, a perk called “bonus depreciation.” Before, depreciation was typically only partially front-loaded, with the full balance spread over five years. The law also for the first time made pre-owned planes eligible for this treatment.

As a result, when Alvarez and Marsal sprang for their second plane in 2018, this one a Gulfstream V, the entire cost was deductible. That year, the pair’s two planes netted them a tax deduction of $14 million.

Last August, their Gulfstream V took off from Westchester County Airport in New York state for Ireland. About an hour later, their Gulfstream IV left for the same destination, a small airport in County Kerry near their club. Both planes can comfortably seat over a dozen passengers, but flight records don’t show who was on board. Over the coming month and a half, the two planes crisscrossed the Atlantic several times.

Were these business trips? Possibly, yes. (ProPublica’s records do not indicate whether specific trips were taken as deductions.) If so, operating expenses — including crew, fuel and other costs — from the partners’ trips to oversee the course would be fully deductible. These deductions would come in addition to depreciation.

Michael Kosnitzky, co-chair of the private client and family office group at the law firm Pillsbury Winthrop, said his wealthy clients often own a business, such as an art gallery, in the same area where they own a vacation home. If the main purpose of a flight there is to attend to that business, jet owners must take care to make that as clear as possible. “I advise my clients to go to their secondary business location first” upon landing, he said, as a way to help build the case.

Accounting for how a jet is used can get complicated. If nonbusiness guests, such as family, ride along on a business flight, it’s treated as a fringe benefit, which is taxable. (The benefit is typically attributed to the jet owner, experts said.) But that wrinkle isn’t too bad: The IRS formula used to calculate the benefit drastically undervalues the cost of riding on a private jet and is closer to the price of a first-class commercial ticket.

Last Christmas, flight records show the two Gulfstreams again leaving together, this time to St. Vincent and the Grenadines in the Caribbean. While Alvarez and Marsal’s consulting firm boasts an office in the Cayman Islands, there isn’t one on these particular islands (which are about 1,400 miles from the Caymans), making it appear this was a family trip. Operating costs from “entertainment” flights like these are not deductible under tax law. But indulging in some pleasure doesn’t necessarily imperil the key tax prize of bonus depreciation: As long as, over the course of a year, the jet is used over 50% of the time for business, the owner gets to keep that perk.

A spokesperson for Alvarez and Marsal’s firm did not respond to a request for comment.

Mori Hosseini made his fortune as a Florida homebuilder and has owned a plane since at least 2006. When Trump’s tax bill began to gain momentum in Congress in the fall of 2017, he decided it was time for a new jet.

The $19.5 million he paid for his nine-seat Bombardier Challenger 350 appeared as a deduction on his 2017 taxes, leading to almost $8 million in tax savings right off the bat. But there were more deductions to come. Even the interest on the loan he’d taken out to buy the plane was deductible, and his 2018 taxes show a $600,000 expense.

Soon, Hosseini, a longtime Republican donor and close adviser to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, was helping the governor and his family travel in style. In 2019, DeSantis’ wife, Casey, flew on the jet from Tallahassee to Jacksonville to attend a fundraiser held by a defense contractor. It was just one of several times that the DeSantises or the campaign have used the jet over the past few years, according to campaign finance records. Such flights are generally allowed under Florida law as long as they are disclosed as in-kind contributions. Hosseini did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

On his taxes, Hosseini says the LLC that holds his plane is in the business of “aircraft leasing.” It’s a very common move among jet owners. When they are not using the plane, they rent out the plane for charter flights, usually via an independent leasing company. Not only does this defray the costs of ownership, but it has tax benefits, too. It helps them establish that they bought the aircraft for a business purpose, the business of chartering.

In theory, taxpayers aren’t allowed to deduct losses from something that has no hope of being a profitable business. In practice, though, some billionaire-owned operations that look like expensive hobbies, such as racing horses in the Kentucky Derby, rack up business deductions by the tens of millions of dollars.

ProPublica examined the tax records of over 30 wealthy Americans who owned planes, and one thing was very clear: Profits in the airplane chartering business for this set, judging from their taxes, were extremely rare. Hosseini's records show two years of profit over an eleven-year period.

Or take George Argyros, a California billionaire real estate developer who once owned the Seattle Mariners. A major GOP donor, he also was the U.S. ambassador to Spain from 2001 to 2004. Argyros, 86, has leased out his aircraft through his own chartering company for decades. From 2002 through 2019, his tax records show, his company pulled a profit just twice. Overall, he deducted over $50 million in net losses over the years.

In June 2021, Argyros’ Gulfstream landed at the small airport near Newburgh in New York’s Hudson Valley, having flown cross-country from California. Nearby, his $83 million, 248-foot yacht the Huntress awaited. Over the coming weeks, the ship would be seen cruising up and down the Hudson River, astounding locals who gawked at its six decks, helipad and hot tub.

A representative for Argyros declined to comment.

Yachts are dealt with differently from airplanes in tax law. They are considered entertainment facilities, so you can’t claim deductions on the premise that you used it for business travel.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no tax savings to be had. Mike Fernandez is a capable businessman, having made a fortune starting and investing in health care companies. But the Florida-based investor seems to have abysmal luck with one of his businesses: leasing out his 180-foot yacht, the Lady Michelle, when he’s not using it. On his 2017 and 2018 tax returns, he claimed a total of $11.3 million in expenses connected with the Lady Michelle from depreciation, repairs, wages and other costs. Meanwhile, his revenue over the two years totaled $178,000. Fernandez did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

Should the IRS audit one of these businesses — itself unlikely over the past decade, due to the gutting of the agency’s budget — the IRS faces a high hurdle: proving that not only was the business not profitable, but that the business owner was not really trying to profit. The case of personal jets adds an additional difficulty for an auditor. The ultrawealthy can often argue that, even if chartering did not result in profits, they also used the plane to help conduct their main business.

Robert Bigelow made his fortune in real estate and owns Budget Suites of America, an extended-stay apartment chain. His passions, however, reach to the skies and beyond. For decades, he’s poured resources into investigating UFO sightings and paranormal phenomena. Two years ago, he announced $1 million in grants from his Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for research “into contact and communication with post-mortem or discarnate consciousness.”

His main focus, however, has been space. He founded Bigelow Aerospace, a company focused on building expandable space habitats. The company has had some successes, winning a contract from NASA for a module for use on the International Space Station. But what it has not had is profits. Bigelow put more than $350 million into the company, “my own real black hole,” as he’s put it.

In the two decades prior to 2018, even as Forbes and The Wall Street Journal variously estimated his net worth as $700 million and $900 million, Bigelow posted negative incomes on his taxes most years, as large losses from his aerospace company wiped out his other income. His personal jet, held by Cosmos Air LLC, also played a role. From 2005 to 2018, he deducted a total of $51 million related to use of his plane. ProPublica could not find evidence that Bigelow charters his aircraft, nor did Bigelow respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

Of course, the deductions could also be justified on the basis that the aircraft is necessary to tend to Bigelow’s various businesses. The plane is a luxury expense, in other words, essential to help him run up millions more in tax deductions — one black hole orbiting another.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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Democratic strategists and top Wall Street giants hail President Joe Biden's billionaire tax proposal as "dead on arrival," CNBC reports.

The plan, which Biden announced during his 2023 State of the Union address,ensures "the ultra-wealthy would owe an annual tax of 20% on unrealized gains or losses in the value of those assets, whether or not they had actually pocketed that gain by selling them," according to CNBC.

Chairman of investment advisory firm Signum Global and 2020 Biden supporter, Charles Myers said Biden's plan is"dead on arrival."

However, other billionaire investors are "skeptical" about its intention, worried that their wealth will be negatively impacted.

Because of this longtime skepticism, Democratic political strategist Jake Dilemani said, "I don’t think anyone realistically expects a billionaire’s tax, in its current proposed form, to come to fruition this year or next."

Dilemani added, "Within the Democratic party, there is dissention regarding how to move this forward, particularly with unrealized gains being part of the equation."

Contrary to fellow investors, billionaire banker Leon Cooperman, who voted for Biden in 2020, told CNBC Biden's proposal is "DOA and stupid to boot." Cooperman opted to "accuse Democrats of deliberately misleading people about how the billionaire tax proposal would work."

He said Democrats "lie about the taxes billionaires pay, as they include unrealized gains as part of income."

Jared Bernstein, White House economist, argued this is not the case. He told “unrealized gains” will not be taxed as part of the plan.

"What it really is, or at least the way we see, it is a prepayment or withholding tax on future capital gains," he said.

Per CNBC, last month, lawmakers from California, New York, Washington, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota and Hawaii established Fund our Future, "a national effort to move wealth tax measures across the country."

New York Democratic State Senator Gustavo Rivera said in the group's statement, "The ultra-rich benefit from our communities, from our public infrastructure and the labor of working families. And because of our backwards tax system, they can avoid paying the taxes that they owe."

He noted, "We must restructure our tax system for fairness."

Arizona Senator KyrstenSinema, who recently registered as Independent after identifying as a Democrat for years, could influence the success of the proposal "if she were to publicly endorse the plan," according to CNBC.

The senator asserted her openness to the possibility of a billionaire income tax, Bloomberg reports, in 2021 when Senator Ron Wyden (D-OH), proposed a similar plan.

Hannah Hurley, Sinema's spokeswoman said, "As always, Kyrsten welcomes the opportunity to review and discuss changes to the tax code, including this proposal from the President."

CNBC's full report is available to read at this link.

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A newly released Government Accountability Office (GAO) office has revealed that 34% of large, profitable corporations paid nothing in federal income taxes in 2018, the same year that large tax cuts, passed by former President Donald Trump, went into effect.

The GAO report found that in 2017, the average tax rate for companies was 14.6 percent. In 2018, it dropped to 8.9 percent. A similar GAO report in 2016 found that 20% of corporations paid zero in federal income taxes. Comparatively,the average American tax rate is about 14.8%, according to the data site Statista.

While the recent GAO report doesn’t name the companies that paid zero in taxes, a 2022 report from the Center for American Progress found that the telecommunications company AT&T made $29.6 billion in 2021, but paid zero in federal income taxes that same year. Instead, AT&T received a $1.2 billion IRS refund, Common Dreams reported.

Similarly, in late December, the House House Ways and Means Committee released Trump’s tax returns from 2015 through 2020. In three of the six years, Trump’s taxable income was zero. This means he paid no income tax in three of the years, and just $750 in 2016.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who requested the report’s creation, responded by stating, “While House Republicans want to make huge cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid because of their ‘serious concern’ about thedeficit, they voted to provide over a trillion dollars in tax breaks to large corporations and the top one percent…. We need to repeal the Trump tax breaks for the rich and demand that the largest corporations in America finally start paying their fair share of taxes.”

Democrats have suggested introducing a minimum corporate tax rate for the wealthiest individuals and corporations, but these groups and Republicans have both opposed them as hostile to “job creators.”

Meanwhile, 63 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and 9.2 percent don’t have health insurance,according to Lending Club and MoneyGeek respectively.

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Amid the Republican battle over the next speaker of the House, Mother Jones Senior Editor Michael Mechanic shed light on another priority of the party — which is the possible enactment of the Family and Small Business Taxpayer Protection Act.

In his reporting, Mechanic asserted that the potential bill is a misnomer, because rather than protecting taxpayers — as the name implies — it would instead protect “tax cheaters” by rolling back IRS funding from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Americans for Tax Fairness founder Frank Clemente said in a recent press release, “The richest 1 percent avoid paying $160 billion a year that they owe in taxes due to inadequate tax enforcement. Republicans are voting to let them keep on cheating the rest of us.”

Mechanic reflected on his 2021 reporting around a similar IRS arrangement back in 2011. The agency’s budget was cut by over $2 billion at the time which resulted in a significant drop in non-filer investigations and an astronomical increase in outstanding tax debt by 2019.

In 2020, it was confirmed that almost 800,000 wealthy non-filers owed a hefty $46 billion collectively, and many of the cases were eventually dismissed without any accountability from the agency.

This is what the $80 billion allotted by the IRA was supposed to rectify. As of October 2022, the Congressional Research Service reported that over a span of 10 years, the funding would update the agency’s outdated systems and technologies, bolster operations support (such as rent, facility, security costs), expand and enhance taxpayer services (prefiling assistance and education), and “monitor and enforce taxes on digital assets such as cryptocurrency."

Then, GOP hardliners and allies of former President Donald Trump attempted to hijack that narrative across social media by claiming that the IRA would instead use the money to hire “87,000 new agents” who would track down “ordinary taxpayers."

Moreover, members of the party who are spewing that lie are not letting up on their desire to repeal 90 percent of the funding, which Americans for Tax Fairness said in its press release would take away plans to improve taxpayer services (for refunds, customer calls, etc.), fund US Tax Court to resolve cases between taxpayers and the agency, and also provide the IRS with enough resources to launch an easy and free, government e-filing system.

Mechanic noted that the GOP’s gesture of proposing anti-tax bills that benefit no one but the 1 percent is nothing new, and Tax Policy Center Senior Fellow Steve Rosenthal presumed that the issue of IRS funding will be “ongoing” in both Senate and House sessions for the foreseeable future.

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Leaked audio obtained this week by Politico revealed that billionaire casino magnate and GOP megadonor Steve Wynn recently offered Republicans a bit of messaging advice as they attempt to win back control of the Senate: Amplify the lies about Democratic tax policies.

During a Wednesday conference call hosted by the Republican National Committee, which is seeking to wrangle big-money donors amid internal concerns that the party's Senate chances are dimming, Wynn recommended "hard-hitting" ads with scripts warning ominously: "They're coming after you if you're a waiter, if you're a bartender, if you're anybody with a cash business... they're coming after you."

Wynn, a once highly prominent figure who has been accused of sexual assault and illegal lobbying, didn't specify which Democratic tax policies he was referencing. But Steve Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, told the Washington Post Thursday that Wynn's suggested messaging resembles GOP attacks on increased funding for the Internal Revenue Service, which Republican lawmakers have systematically deprived of resources for years—a major boon to rich tax-dodgers and large corporations.

"The lack of resources prevents the IRS from ensuring that large and sprawling operations pay their full tax bill," Rosenthal said in an interview with the Post's Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman. "The point of increased enforcement is to pursue these businesses."

Wynn's advice came after the GOP had already launched hysterical attacks on the $80 billion in IRS funding included in the newly enacted Inflation Reduction Act, which passed both chambers of Congress this month without a single Republican vote. In floor debate over the package, House Republicans falsely claimed the funding would enable "robbery" by gun-wielding IRS agents.

In reality, the money will go toward ensuring the agency is capable of mundane tasks—such as answering phone calls—as well as giving it the capacity and resources to audit ultra-rich taxpayers whose returns have gone under-examined for years.[twt]

earlier this year, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse published an analysis showing that the IRS audited low-income wage earners at a rate five times higher than everyone else in Fiscal Year 2021, a trend the agency has blamed on the higher costs of auditing wealthier taxpayers.

In a letter to the IRS chief earlier this month, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen specifically instructed the tax agency to use the new funding from the Inflation Reduction Act to "increase equity in the tax system by enforcing the tax laws against those high-earners, large corporations, and complex partnerships who today do not pay what they owe."

As Rosenthal put it to the Post,"Wynn is trying to push Republicans to scare the little fish into thinking the IRS is targeting them, when in fact the IRS has pledged to target the big fish."

Sargent and Waldman argued in a column Thursday that "it's pretty revealing for Wynn to be urging Republicans to attack those policies by arguing that their real victims will be waiters and bartenders."

"Democrats should jump on this," they wrote.

According to Politico, the 36-minute conference call also featured Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel begging rich donors to inject funding into Senate races as GOP leaders openly raise doubts about the party's prospects of retaking the upper chamber in November.

Recent polling in the key battleground states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, for example, shows that Democratic candidates John Fetterman and Mandela Barnes have opened up leads against their Republican opponents.

"Please help us invest in these Senate races specifically," McDaniel told donors on the call. "Give to any of these Senate candidates, all of these Senate candidates if you can, so all of them can be on TV."

Politico reported that Wynn "asked whether there are any dark-money nonprofits that contributors could give to."

Donors, he said, "are self-conscious for reasons that are personal to them, business people and folks like that."

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sinema gets carried interest loophole reform jettisoned;

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/one-senator-wealthy-essentially-unaffected/

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/kyrsten-sinema/

Senate Democrats passed a pared-backed reconciliation package on Sunday, but only after a pair of widely supported provisions that would have made it harder for Wall Street tycoons to reduce their tax bills were removed at the behest of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema—the right-wing Arizona Democrat who has taken more than $500,000 in campaign contributions from private equity executives during the current election cycle.

"Remember the days when taking half a million bucks from an industry, and then passing legislation that only benefits that industry, while passing the costs onto everyone else, would be called corruption?" Brown University political economist Mark Blyth asked on social media. "Today it's just lobbying as usual."

:{:{}:

Last week, Sinema agreed to back the Inflation Reduction Act as long as the so-called "carried interest loophole," which benefits hedge fund managers and private equity moguls by allowing their investment income to be taxed at the long-term capital gains rate of around 20% rather than the ordinary top income rate of 37%, was preserved.

Democrats, who needed Sinema's support to pass the filibuster-proof bill through the evenly split Senate, obliged, forgoing a modest reform that would have raised an estimated $14 billion in federal revenue over a decade by increasing the holding period for investments to qualify for preferential tax treatment from three to five years.

As the Financial Times noted Monday, the Arizona Democrat "is a beneficiary of significant contributions from the private equity industry—whose lobbying machine and political influence have grown increasingly powerful over the past two decades."

Citing Federal Election Commission filings, the newspaper reported:

Sinema has received more than half a million dollars in campaign donations from private equity group executives in this election cycle alone, representing about 10% of her fundraising from individual donors. This includes individual donations totalling $54,900 from executives at KKR, $35,000 from Carlyle, $27,300 from Apollo, $24,500 from Crow Holdings Capital and $23,300 from Riverside Partners.

The securities and investment sector as a whole has donated more than $2.2 million to Sinema since she was elected in 2017,according to OpenSecrets. Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich quipped last week, amid reports of Sinema's plans to undermine her party's efforts to hike taxes on corporations and the wealthy, that Wall Street is "getting a huge return on their investment."

In addition to stripping the carried interest provision from the Inflation Reduction Act, Sinema protected private equity-owned corporations from a new 15% minimum tax on billion-dollar firms.

As The Washington Post reported Sunday:

As originally written, the provision would have required private equity firms to tally profits from their various holdings and pay the tax if the total exceeded the $1 billion threshold.

Sinema, who for over a year has blocked Democratic ambitions to raise taxes, raised objections on Saturday, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private talks. The senator argued that, without changes to the bill, small and medium-sized businesses that happen to be owned by private equity firms would be exposed to the tax, violating a Democratic pledge to hike taxes only on the largest firms. A Sinema spokeswoman said several Arizona small businesses, including a plant nursery, had raised concerns.

Steve Wamhoff, an analyst at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a progressive think tank, told the Post, "The idea that billion-dollar private equity funds must be protected to save small businesses is absolutely absurd."

:{:{}:

Nevertheless, the newspaper noted, "the last-minute changes mark a significant victory for the private equity industry and an estimated savings of $35 billion over the next decade."

Following the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act on Sunday, the progressive tax reform group Patriotic Millionaires ran a mobile billboard around the Capitol to thank Senate Democrats, with the exception of Sinema, who was denounced for being bought by private equity billionaires. The truck made stops at the offices of the American Investment Council and the Carlyle Group in Washington, D.C.

"Bravo to 49 of the 50 senators who voted today to end an era of rampant criminal tax abuse at the highest levels of American society and American business," Erica Payne, founder and president of Patriotic Millionaires, said in a statement. "In a journey of 1,000 miles, this is an impressive first step."

"Shame on Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who had to be dragged kicking and screaming across the finish line, carrying water for her private equity overloads to the bitter end," Payne continued. "Thanks in large part to Sinema's obstruction, there's more work to be done, but the Inflation Reduction Act is a monumental step in the right direction."

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/billionaires-gop-congress/

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Just 27 billionaires have spent $90 million to buy GOP congress: report

[ brk windows london? ]

Rupert Murdoch receiving the 2015 Global Leadership Award, Wikimedia Commons

Kenny Stancil and Common Dreams July 19, 2022

A few dozen billionaires are spending tens of millions of dollars on the 2022 midterm elections—mostly to support Republican candidates, including many who have parroted the dangerous lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen—in a bid to ensure that Congress is full of lawmakers willing "to make their wealthy benefactors even richer," according to a fresh analysis.

Titled Billionaires Buying Elections, the report from Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) details how "billionaires are increasingly using their personal fortunes and the profits of connected corporations to drown out regular voters' voices and elect hand-picked candidates who further rig the nation's economy—especially the tax system."

A pair of super PACs tasked with securing Republican majorities in the House and Senate—the Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF) and the [cnp?] Senate Leadership Fund (SLF)—raised a combined $188.3 million through the first 16 months of the 2022 campaign cycle, according to ATF. Nearly half—$89.4 million, or 48%—came from just 27 billionaires. A whopping 86% of the GOP's billionaire money came from "Wall Street tycoons" who are arguably the biggest beneficiaries of glaring loopholes in the tax code.

The Democratic counterparts of those two super PACs—the House Majority PAC and the Senate Majority PAC—raised a combined $154 million over the same time period. A smaller share—$25.8 million, or 17%—came from 19 billionaires. A majority of billionaire contributions to Democratic candidates also came from the finance and investment sector (35%), but other industries were also well-represented, including cryptocurrency (26%), and tech (18%).

"Unlike candidates and party committees, super PACs can raise unlimited donations from individuals and corporations," ATF explained. "In return they are not supposed to coordinate activities with the campaigns they support but instead act independently, though that rule is often flouted."

Top billionaire donors to congressional super PACs include hedge fund magnate Ken Griffin, who has given more than $28.5 million to CLF and SLF, and private equity mogul Stephen Schwarzman, who has pumped $20 million into the GOP's two super PACs.

"Anti-democratic vote-buying," ATF wrote, "has been facilitated by—and is facilitating—the accelerating wealth growth of the billionaire class and the record profits of the corporations they own."

The combined net worth of the nation's roughly 750 billionaires surged by $2 trillion, or 70%, during the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic. The collective wealth of the 27 billionaires bankrolling the GOP's super PACs alone soared by $82.4 billion over that time period, meaning that the $89.4 million they have donated to CLF and SLF constitutes less than 0.1% of their overall pandemic-era gains.

Meanwhile, the return on that modest investment could amount to billions of dollars if Republicans take back Congress in November and preserve their 2017 tax cuts or further slash taxes on superrich people and the corporations they own.

Over a recent nine-year period, the 400 wealthiest people in the U.S. paid an average effective federal income tax rate of just 8.2% when the increased value of their stock holdings is included in their income. That is a lower rate than the nationwide average of 13.3% in 2019.

As ATF explained, focusing on contributions to congressional super PACs fails "to capture the full political influence of billionaires, who in addition to personal donations also steer money to favored candidates from related corporations and organizations."

Billionaires are among the ultrawealthy Americans who control corporations through their extensive stock holdings. Many corporate giants have been distorting the upcoming midterms, ATF pointed out, by spending tens of millions to help GOP candidates who have vowed to defend special tax breaks for the top 1% get elected, including 144 far-right members of Congress who voted to overturn President Joe Biden's electoral victory.

According to the report, seven powerful corporations—AT&T,Chevron, ExxonMobil,FedEx, GM, Merck, and UPS—have collectively given nearly $1.5 million to dozens of election deniers and various Republican PACs and election committees this campaign cycle. The companies' demonstrated lack of concern for democracy, ATF noted, likely stems from their desire to keep dodging taxes. In 2021, these firms paid an average federal income tax rate of just 2.7% on a combined $78.4 billion in profits.

Notably, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal who is worth about $5 billion and openly opposed to democracy, has been spending big on his preferred Republican candidates but not through the GOP's congressional super PACs.

Thiel "has so far spent almost $30 million through super PACs supporting the 2022 senatorial bids of two former employees who share his anti-democratic and anti-tax beliefs," ATF found. "J.D. Vance won the Ohio Republican U.S. Senate primary thanks in part to Thiel's $15 million in spending. Blake Masters has a fighting chance in Arizona's GOP U.S. Senate primary in August due to Thiel's $13.5 million in contributions."

Another source of "billionaire dominance of campaign financing, especially on the Republican side," wrote ATF, are so-called "dark money" groups, which are not required to disclose the identity of their donors. Some dark money groups—including Club for Growth, which has received $32 million from billionaire Wall Street trader Jeffrey Yass over the years—are "notorious for having bankrolled insurrectionist members of Congress" like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), ATF noted.

According to the report:

Politically active billionaire Charles Koch has not personally donated to either GOP super PAC this cycle, but his corporation—Koch Industries—has so far given them a total of $1.75 million.

Two of the biggest "dark money" groups, which do not disclose their donors, are essentially sister groups to thetwo congressional GOP super PACs. American Action Networkgave at least $26 million to CLF in the 2020 cycle and $18.7 million so far this cycle.One Nation donated $77.5 million to SLF last cycle and has given $16.5 million so far this cycle.

The ability of the nation's wealthiest individuals to translate their disproportionate economic power into political clout has increased exponentially since the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision eliminated effective limits on campaign contributions.

According to the report:

Billionaires pumped $1.2 billion into the 2020 elections, almost 40 times more than the $31 million they donated in 2010, when the Citizens United rules were first in effect. In the 2020 election cycle, billionaires contributed nearly $1 out of every $10, while making up just 0.01% of all donors contributing more than $200.

Billionaires donated almost $240 million to the combined campaign efforts of Donald Trump's two runs for president. Over half came from just one billionaire household, that of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson (who has since died).

"Billionaires, who are used to buying whatever they want, have increasingly dedicated their almost unlimited resources to buying American elections," Frank Clemente, executive director of ATF, said in a statement.

"The problem is what's good for billionaires—including cutting taxes on the rich and corporations—is bad for working families," said Clemente. "We need to rein in billionaire political and economic power through campaign finance reforms and tax reforms such as a billionaires income tax."

Several legislative proposals have emerged to tax the increased value of assets owned by the nation's wealthiest households each year regardless of whether they sell or keep them, which would ensure that income derived from wealth is taxed more like income earned from work.

:{:{}:

Biden's plan would raise an estimated $360 billion over 10 years, while Sen. Ron Wyden's (D-Ore.) plan would raise an estimated $550 billion over a decade, and Rep. Jamaal Bowman's (D-N.Y.) proposal possibly even more.

:{:{}:

Billionaire-backed Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.), however, has joined Senate Republicans in opposing such a measure.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/billionaire-hedge-fund/

Series: The Secret IRS Files

Inside the Tax Records of the .001%

For billionaire Ken Griffin, it was well worth spending $54 million to ensure he and other rich Illinoisans wouldn’t have to pay more tax.

By the time Illinois voters streamed into voting booths on Election Day in 2020, Griffin, then Illinois’ wealthiest resident, had made sure they’d heard plenty about why they should not vote to raise taxes on him and the state’s other rich people. His tens of millions paid for an unrelenting stream of ads and flyers against an initiative on that year’s ballot, which would have allowed Illinois lawmakers to join 32 other states in setting higher tax rates for the wealthy than for everyone else.

In the end, Griffin spent about $18 for every one of the 3.1 million votes against theinitiative. After initial optimism about its prospects, the measure came up hundreds of thousands of votes short and went down to defeat.

Rarely does the public get a clear view of the payoff for wealthy Americans who put their money down to achieve a political outcome. But in this case, ProPublica’s trove of IRS data can provide crucial context for the ballot fight. For Griffin and many of his fellow ultrawealthy Illinoisans, spending even such a vast amount was well worth it when compared with what a tax hike might have cost them.

According to the data, Griffin averaged an annual income of $1.7 billion from 2013 to 2018. That was the fourth-highest in the country, behind only the likes of Bill Gates.

Using that average income as a guideline, the new state tax increase, which aimed to raise the rate from 5% to 8% on the highest incomes, would have cost Griffin around $51 million every year in extra tax. In especially good years — in 2018, Griffin reported income of almost $2.9 billion — he might have been forced to pay more than $80 million more.

A Citadel spokesperson responding on Griffin’s behalf pointed out that, according to ProPublica’s previously published data, Griffin paid the second-highest amount of taxes of any American from 2013 to 2018. “Over the past decade,” he said in a statement, “it is almost a certainty that Ken has been the largest individual taxpayer in the State of Illinois — a state notorious for profligate spending and rampant corruption.” Griffin has said he’s not against raising taxes; he opposed the measure, he added in his statement, because “Illinois needs to put its fiscal house in order before burdening hard-working families with yet more taxes.”

The state’s current flat tax rate of 5% is far below the top rates in other large states run by Democrats like California and New York and comparable to those in some Republican-led states like Utah. Advocates for raising the rates on the wealthy in Illinois say the state needs additional revenue, pointing to its regular budget deficits and deep pension debts.

Not all Griffin’s political bets pay off. A candidate for Illinois governor he supported with tens of millions of dollars went down to defeat in June’s Republican primary. Meanwhile, even though the income tax initiative was defeated, Griffin announced last month that he was moving Citadel’s headquarters to Miami and relocating there himself.

Though no other donor to the anti-tax fight came close to matching the tens of millions that Griffin gave, others made contributions that were more than what most Illinois households earn in a year. ProPublica analyzed the tax data of nine other ultrawealthy supporters of Griffin’s anti-tax campaign. According to our estimate, this group of heirs and business owners, which includes some of the wealthiest people in Illinois, can expect to see a healthy return on their contributions and save millions in taxes over the coming years.

The math behind our estimate is simple: Wealthy Illinoisans will save about 3% of their income, because that was the size of the proposed tax increase on the wealthy. That’s essentially how Illinois’ state income taxes work for Illinois residents. With some adjustments, a state tax rate is applied to the income listed on their federal returns. ProPublica contacted all 10 of the anti-tax donors mentioned in this article and the accompanying chart. None challenged the methodology used to estimate their tax savings.

Richard Uihlein, who along with Griffin has emerged as a conservative megadonor on the national stage, pitched in $100,000 to the anti-tax campaign — for him a modest amount given his average annual income of $492 million in recent years. Through his family foundation, Uihlein has also given millions of dollars to the Illinois Policy Institute, a small-government group that fought the graduated tax plan. Uihlein’s average income would lead to about $15 million of annual tax savings from the defeat of the ballot initiative.

Sam Zell, the real estate mogul known in Chicago for putting together a leveraged buyout of the Tribune Company that preceded its bankruptcy, gave $1.1 million. Based on his recent income, he would save $1.6 million in taxes each year. A spokesperson for Zell declined to comment.

Patrick Ryan made his billions in insurance, and Northwestern University’s football stadium and basketball arena bear his family’s name, thanks to the hundreds of millions he’s given the school. He gave $1 million. His recent income suggests $2.1 million in annual tax savings.

Richard Colburn, whose billionaire family owns the electrical parts maker CED, gave $500,000 to the anti-tax campaign, which would help save him $5.5 million each year in taxes, according to our estimates. In an email message to ProPublica, Colburn said his reasons for opposing the graduated tax were simple: It would have “eaten substantially” into his investment earnings, some of which he passes on to a nonprofit foundation he manages. Like Griffin, he contended the state would not have used the money well.

“Though I enjoy living in the Chicago area, I could save immensely by moving to a lower-tax state, and therefore I ‘invested’ to limit the temptation on me to relocate,” Colburn wrote. “Another element of my ‘investment’ stems from my desire to limit the mis-spending by the State of Illinois that occurs every time Springfield has extra money.” (His full statement is here.)

Donald Wilson, founder of the trading firm DRW, gave $250,000 to the anti-tax campaign. That donation in particular looks modest when weighed against his potential tax savings: Based on Wilson’s average annual income of $114 million, the proposed tax increase would have cost him $3.5 million more every year.

Some of the contributions to the anti-tax campaign came from trusts, special legal entities often used by the wealthy to hide or protect assets, as well as to avoid the estate tax. Richard Stephenson, founder of a chain of for-profit hospitals called Cancer Treatment Centers of America, contributed $300,000 through his Celebrate Life Trust. Stephenson is a longtime Republican donor and such an enthusiast of Ayn Rand’s message of uncompromising self-interest that he was an executive producer on two movies based on the novel “Atlas Shrugged.”

Uihlein, Ryan, Wilson and Stephenson also did not respond to requests for comment.

One $25,000 contribution came from the Philip M. Friedmann Family Charitable Trust. Friedmann made his fortune by selling the greeting card company he co-founded to a private equity firm.

Friedmann’s trust, unlike Stephenson’s, is a personal foundation. That means Friedmann likely received a tax deduction for donating to his own organization, which then used some of the funds to fight an increase in his taxes.

The contribution to the anti-tax campaign by Friedmann’s foundation appears to have violated federal tax law, three nonprofit tax law experts told ProPublica. Personal foundations are prohibited from spending to try to influence legislation, a category that includes contributions to a ballot initiative committee, said Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a law professor at Notre Dame. Organizations that break that law are required to pay a penalty of up to 25% of the expenditure in addition to attempting to retrieve the money.

Although this prohibition is spelled out on the IRS’ online guide for private foundations, “smaller family foundations don’t always know the applicable rules,” said Ellen Aprill, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University.

Friedmann did not respond to requests for comment.

Illinois didn’t have an income tax of any kind until 1969, when a deal between GOP Gov. Richard Ogilvie and Democratic Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley resulted in a flat statewide tax of 2.5% on individuals and 4% on corporations. Some Democrats said the tax disproportionately punished low-income families, and pushed for higher rates on the wealthy. But Republicans and other critics argued for expiration dates or rate limits, warning that otherwise lawmakers would simply keep hiking and expanding income taxes. The following year, a compromise was encoded in the state’s updated constitution. It clarified that the General Assembly had the power to impose an income tax but only “at a non-graduated rate.”

As the state’s fiscal problems grew in the following decades, governors and legislators repeatedly raised the flat tax rate until it was up to 5% on individuals. In 2014, multimillionaire private equity investor Bruce Rauner, a Republican backed by Griffin, was elected governor after promising to slash taxes, and the rate was lowered to 3.75%. But as Rauner fell into a bitter standoff with the Democratic-controlled General Assembly, the state went without a budget for more than two years, leaving it in an even deeper financial hole.

The General Assembly, including some Republicans, voted in 2017 to raise the income tax again, to 4.95% on individuals.

Democrat JB Pritzker, a billionaire investor whose family founded the Hyatt hotel chain, launched his campaign for governor by casting himself as a wealthy man who would fight for the middle class — and for a graduated tax that was less burdensome for low-income families than the flat-rate system. Rauner vowed to stop him. Their 2018 campaigns spent more than $250 million combined, including $22.5 million that Griffin gave to Rauner, before Pritzker won that November.

With the support of a committed and rich governor, a graduated income tax suddenly seemed possible in Illinois.

“That created a bunch of new momentum,” said Ralph Martire, executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a think tank that argued in favor of a graduated income tax. “That was enough political support to really get the grassroots groups working on it.”

Outside of a special convention, both the Illinois House and Senate must sign off on a state constitutional amendment by three-fifths majorities. Voters then need to approve it, either by a clear majority of all voters casting ballots in a general election or a three-fifths majority of those voting on the measure itself.

In 2019 the Senate and then the House each met that threshold, passing a measure that would eliminate the graduated income tax ban if voters approved an amendment. Companion legislation laid out what the new tax schedule would be: Rates would either drop or remain at 4.95% for people reporting income up to $250,000; they would climb from there, to a rate of 7.99% on individuals earning above $750,000 and couples above $1 million. The top rate was within the range of those in other Midwest states with graduated systems — higher than Missouri’s but lower than Iowa’s.

Supporters and opponents then had more than a year to make their cases.

Illinois election laws set some limits on campaign donations and spending. But the rules are riddled with loopholes, and they impose no limits on political committees formed to advocate for or against ballot initiatives like the income tax proposal.

Opponents of the graduated income tax formed at least five different campaign committees that raised nearly $63 million altogether. The best funded, by far, was the Coalition to Stop the Proposed Tax Hike Amendment, which collected almost $60 million, including the $54 million from Griffin. The coalition received most of its remaining money from other billionaires and millionaires, according to state campaign donation records.

On the other side, Pritzker created the Vote Yes for Fairness committee, plowing $58 million of his own fortune to support the “fair tax” campaign. Apart from Pritzker’s donations, the committee received just one $250 contribution, records show.

Griffin also launched other offensives. In October 2020, the Chicago Tribune reported that Griffin had lambasted Pritzker as “a shameless master of personal tax avoidance” in an email to Citadel’s Chicago staff.

The bulk of Pritzker’s wealth ($3.6 billion, according to Forbes) is in trusts, some domestic and some located offshore. Pritzker has said some were set up by his grandfather. As ProPublica reported last year, it was common for 20th century patriarchs to set up trusts that passed fortunes down through the generations free of estate taxes.

Pritzker has released his personal tax returns, but has not provided detailed information about the trusts. For 2020, Pritzker’s office released returns showing $5.1 million in personal income for the governor and his wife, MK. The domestic trusts benefiting the governor also paid $16.3 million in Illinois taxes and $69.6 million in federal taxes in 2020, according to Pritzker spokesperson Natalie Edelstein.

ProPublica’s IRS data does not shed light on those trusts. When ProPublica requested further detail, Edelstein said the governor is not releasing documents concerning the trusts because he “is not the only beneficiary, so he does not have authority to release all of the information.” She said that the governor had not personally accepted any disbursements from the offshore trusts, instead giving them to charity. She did not address whether the trusts had been set up to avoid estate taxes, only saying they were “established generations ago.”

At the height of the graduated income tax campaign, advertisements for and against the initiative seemed to be everywhere in Illinois — in mailboxes, online, all over the airwaves.

“You couldn’t even watch TV — it was just one ad after another,” recalled David Merriman, a public administration professor at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Merriman’s research had found that Illinois received less revenue from income taxes and placed a higher tax burden on low-income taxpayers than neighboring states with graduated systems, including states led by Republicans. But, perhaps predictably, the ads largely avoided policy discussions in favor of political appeals.

“At the worst possible time, Springfield politicians are pushing a constitutional amendment that would give them new powers to make it easier to raise taxes on all Illinois taxpayers,” a narrator in one anti-tax ad declared. “And if there’s one thing we know about Springfield politicians, it’s that you can’t trust them.”

The fair-tax campaign accused the rich of trying to fool middle-class families and claimed, based on the state Senate bill that had already passed, that as many as 97% of taxpayers would pay the same or less under the governor’s plan.

But voters weren’t convinced. Federal investigations of several Chicago and state politicians were making headlines, and Merriman said the graduated tax advocates failed to persuade voters that they would benefit from the amendment. The initiative failed by a vote of 53% to 47%.

“It showed just how distrustful everyone is of the government,” he said.

The big money battle has continued in the Illinois governor’s race this year. This January, Pritzker deposited $90 million into his own reelection fund — the largest single political contribution in Illinois in decades and probably ever. Under state election law, candidates can lift donation limits in a race by funding their own campaigns.

Several of the anti-tax funders contributed large sums to Republicans aiming to unseat Pritzker this fall. Once again, Griffin led the way, spending $50 million, but his handpicked candidate lost the GOP primary last week to Darren Bailey, a right-wing state senator propelled by more than $17 million Uihlein gave to his campaign and an aligned super PAC. Pritzker and the Democratic Governors Association also went head-to-head with Griffin, paying for ads attacking his candidate, Richard Irvin.

Bailey received an endorsement from Donald Trump the weekend before the election and finished with about 58% of the vote. Irvin faded to third place with 15%. In his election night victory speech, Bailey ripped Pritzker as an “out-of-touch, elitist billionaire.”

“Do you feel overtaxed?” Bailey called out to his supporters. Their response: “Yeah!”

By then, Griffin had made a big announcement that meant his state tax bill would plummet.

In a letter to Citadel employees, Griffin announced that he was moving the company’s headquarters to Miami and that he himself had already moved his family to the area.

Florida does not have a personal income tax. Experts told ProPublica Griffin will still pay some personal income tax in New York and Illinois since Citadel has offices there. But his bill is sure to shrink dramatically, likely saving him tens of millions a year.

In response to ProPublica’s questions, Citadel did not address whether taxes motivated his move. Instead, in its statement the spokesperson cited crime concerns as the prime motivator: “Ken left Illinois for a simple reason: the state is devolving into anarchy. Senseless violence is now part of daily life in Chicago.”

Griffin’s letter to Citadel staff also made no mention of taxes as being a reason for the move. Instead, it rhapsodized about how Miami “embodies the American Dream — embracing the possibilities of what can be achieved by a community working to build a future together.”

===

no lnx

Here are 10 ways billionaires avoid taxes on an epic scale

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/billionaires/

Paul Kiel and ProPublica June 26, 2022

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox

Series: The Secret IRS Files

Inside the Tax Records of the .001%

Last June, drawing on the largest trove of confidential American tax data that’s ever been obtained, ProPublica launched a series of stories documenting the key ways the ultrawealthy avoid taxes, strategies that are largely unavailable to most taxpayers. To mark the first anniversary of the launch, we decided to assemble a quick summary of the techniques — all of which can generate tax savings on a massive scale — revealed in the series.

1. The Ultra Wealth Effect

Our first story unraveled how billionaires like Elon Musk, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos were able to amass some of the largest fortunes in history while paying remarkably little tax relative to their immense wealth. They did it in part by avoiding selling off their vast holdings of stock. The U.S. system taxes income. Selling stock generates income, so they avoid income as the system defines it. Meanwhile, billionaires can tap into their wealth by borrowing against it. And borrowing isn’t taxable. (Buffett said he followed the law and preferred that his wealth go to charity; the others didn’t comment beyond a “?” from Musk.)

The $5 Billion IRA

Other billionaires used less conventional ways to avoid income, we found. Tech mogul Peter Thiel amassed a $5 billion Roth IRA, a type of account that shields income from taxes and is intended to help low- and middle-class savers prepare for retirement. Back in 1999, Thiel stuffed low-valued shares of the company that would become PayPal into the account, a maneuver tax lawyers said risked running afoul of IRS rules. (It’s not clear if the government ever challenged the move.) He set himself up to reap billions in untaxed gains. (Thiel did not respond to questions for the original article.)

The $1 Billion Parlor Trick: Turning High-Tax-Rate Trading into Low-Tax-Rate Income

Even when tech billionaires do show income on their tax return, they tend to pay relatively low income tax rates. That’s because of the type of income they have: Gains from long-term investments, such as from stock sales, are taxed at a lower rate. But what do you do if you’re making over $1 billion every year, and it’s largely from short-term trading? Do you just accept that you’ll pay the higher rate on all that income? As we reported this week,Jeff Yass, head of one of the most profitable firms on Wall Street, did not meekly accept this fate. Instead, his firm, Susquehanna International Group,found creative ways to transform the wrong sort of income into the right kind, generating tax savings that exceeded $1 billion over just six years. (Susquehanna declined to comment but in a court case that centered on similar allegations, it maintained that it complies with the law.)

4: The Magic of Sports Ownership: Make Money While (Legally) Reporting Losses

The tax code offers business owners a slew of methods to erase income through deductions, none more awesome than buying a sports team, as former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer did with the Los Angeles Clippers. It doesn’t matter whether the team is actually profitable and growing in value. It can still be a write-off. (In some cases, we found, owners could effectively deduct a given player’s contract not once, but twice. They’re allowed to take deductions comparable to those for factory equipment that loses value as it ages, even as teams almost inevitably gain in value.) That’s one reason owners tend to pay far lower tax rates than the athletes they employ, or even the people serving beer in the team’s stadium. In our story, we found a Clippers arena worker who made $45,000 a year and paid a higher tax rate than the billionaire Ballmer. (Ballmer said he pays the taxes he owes.)

5. Build, Drill and Save: The Real Estate and Oil Businesses Can Both Be Tax Havens

In certain industries, like real estate or oil and gas, the tax breaks are so plentiful that billionaires can erase their income entirely even as they grow richer. That’s how real estate developer Stephen Ross (who also happens to own the Miami Dolphins)went 10 years without paying any income tax. Ross said that he followed the law. Another mogul, this one in the oil business, managed to tap a near bottomless well of write-offs via one of the biggest oil spills in history. (The mogul’s representatives did not respond to requests for comment.)

Even a Billionaire’s Hobbies Can Pay Off at Tax Time

Deductions from hobbies and side projects, which the ultrawealthy can structure as businesses, are another fun option. For some billionaires, it’s race horses: We found that six owners of thoroughbreds at the 2021 Kentucky Derby had taken a combined $600 million in tax write-offs on their horse racing operations. For others, like Beanie Babies founder Ty Warner, it’sluxury hotels. The billionaire splurged on a couple of landmark Four Seasons locations and then went 12 years without paying any income tax. (Representatives for Warner did not respond to requests for comment.)

Think Your Taxes are Too High? Change the Tax Laws

Sometimes, it pays to fight for a new tax break. For the billionaires who contributed millions to Republican politicians, the payoff came in the form of Trump’s “big, beautiful tax cut” for passthrough businesses. We found the change sent $1 billion in tax savings in a single year to just 82 ultrawealthy households.Some business owners also boosted their savings with a trick: They slashed their own salaries and categorized the money instead as passthrough income.

8. Why Tech Billionaires Pay Less Than Hedge-Fund Managers

With so many options to reduce taxes, the richest Americans often manage low income tax rates. We analyzed the incomes and taxes of the country’s top 400 earners, those averaging over $110 million in income per year. Overall, the group paid relatively low rates, but certain segments (tech billionaires, heirs, private equity executives) stood out even within this elite population because they were able to draw on the sorts of techniques detailed above. (Also drawing on these techniques were wealthy politicians, like the governors of Colorado and West Virginia.)

Brother, Can You Spare a Stimulus Check?

But the real standouts were the billionaires who reported such low incomes that they qualified for government assistance. At least 18 billionaires received stimulus checks in 2020, because their tax returns placed them below the income cutoff ($150,000 for a married couple).

Trust This: How Wealthy Families Pass Billions to Heirs While Avoiding Taxes

The holes in the estate tax, we found, are even more remarkable. There are well-worn ways to make sure Uncle Sam doesn’t get his cut of a fortune being passed on to heirs, and the most common is through a trust. How common no one can say, but we found evidence thatat least half of the nation’s 100 richest individuals had used estate-tax-dodging trusts.In another story, we followed three century-old dynasties down through the generations, showing how they used trusts to avoid taxes, so that a fortune could pass all the way from the original early 20th century tycoon to, for example, the great-great-granddaughter who recently collected $210 million before her 19th birthday.

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LNX

he Ultra Wealth Effect

Our first story unraveled how billionaires like Elon Musk, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos were able to amass some of the largest fortunes in history while payingremarkably little tax relative to their immense wealth. They did it in part by avoiding selling off their vast holdings of stock. The U.S. system taxes income. Selling stock generates income, so they avoid income as the system defines it. Meanwhile, billionaires can tap into their wealth by borrowing against it. And borrowing isn’t taxable. (Buffett said he followed the law and preferred that his wealth go to charity; the others didn’t comment beyond a “?” from Musk.)

2. The $5 Billion IRA

Other billionaires used less conventional ways to avoid income, we found. Tech mogul Peter Thiel amassed a $5 billion Roth IRA, a type of account that shields income from taxes and is intended to help low- and middle-class savers prepare for retirement. Back in 1999, Thiel stuffed low-valued shares of the company that would become PayPal into the account, a maneuver tax lawyers said risked running afoul of IRS rules. (It’s not clear if the government ever challenged the move.) He set himself up to reap billions in untaxed gains. (Thiel did not respond to questions for the original article.)

3. The $1 Billion Parlor Trick: Turning High-Tax-Rate Trading into Low-Tax-Rate Income

Even when tech billionaires do show income on their tax return, they tend to pay relatively low income tax rates. That’s because of the type of income they have: Gains from long-term investments, such as from stock sales, are taxed at a lower rate. But what do you do if you’re making over $1 billion every year, and it’s largely from short-term trading? Do you just accept that you’ll pay the higher rate on all that income? As we reported this week, Jeff Yass, head of one of the most profitable firms on Wall Street, did not meekly accept this fate. Instead, his firm, Susquehanna International Group, found creative ways to transform the wrong sort of income into the right kind, generating tax savings that exceeded $1 billion over just six years. (Susquehanna declined to comment but in a court case that centered on similar allegations, it maintained that it complies with the law.)

4: The Magic of Sports Ownership: Make Money While (Legally) Reporting Losses

5. Build, Drill and Save: The Real Estate and Oil Businesses Can Both Be Tax Havens

In certain industries, like real estate or oil and gas, the tax breaks are so plentiful that billionairescan erase their income entirely even as they grow richer. That’s how real estate developer Stephen Ross (who also happens to own the Miami Dolphins) went 10 years without paying any income tax. Ross said that he followed the law. Another mogul, this one in the oil business, managed to tap a near bottomless well of write-offs via one of the biggest oil spills in history. (The mogul’s representatives did not respond to requests for comment.)

6. Even a Billionaire’s Hobbies Can Pay Off at Tax Time

Deductions from hobbies and side projects, which the ultrawealthy can structure as businesses, are another fun option. For some billionaires, it’s race horses: We found that six owners of thoroughbreds at the 2021 Kentucky Derby had taken a combined $600 million in tax write-offs on their horse racing operations. For others, like Beanie Babies founder Ty Warner, it’s luxury hotels. The billionaire splurged on a couple of landmark Four Seasons locations and then went 12 years without paying any income tax. (Representatives for Warner did not respond to requests for comment.)

7. Think Your Taxes are Too High? Change the Tax Laws

Sometimes, it pays to fight for a new tax break. For the billionaires who contributed millions to Republican politicians, the payoff came in the form of Trump’s “big, beautiful tax cut” for passthrough businesses. We found the change sent $1 billion in tax savings in a single year to just 82 ultrawealthy households. Some business owners also boosted their savings with a trick: They slashed their own salaries and categorized the money instead as passthrough income.

8. Why Tech Billionaires Pay Less Than Hedge-Fund Managers

9. Brother, Can You Spare a Stimulus Check?

10. Trust This: How Wealthy Families Pass Billions to Heirs While Avoiding Taxes

The holes in the estate tax, we found, are even more remarkable. There are well-worn ways to make sure Uncle Sam doesn’t get his cut of a fortune being passed on to heirs, and the most common is through a trust. How common no one can say, but we found evidence that at least half of the nation’s 100 richest individuals had used estate-tax-dodging trusts. In another story,we followed three century-old dynasties down through the generations, showing how they used trusts to avoid taxes, so that a fortune could pass all the way from the original early 20th century tycoon to, for example, the great-great-granddaughter who recently collected $210 million before her 19th birthda

===

inequality productions: many vids

left vs rt shift clinton triangulate: polar

ineq expl 12 min rr primer; dynastic wealth // royal, ~ meritocracy estate and capital gains tax --> amplifying

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOI8RuhW7q0

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torres -sp

Chapter 7 · Avoiding the Taxman 143

TJ: "Merchants have no country"

taxes are test of allegiance

local tax breaks rarely produce much in terms of jobs (bail for better deal); NASCAR has own tax break;corps can write off legal fees when do crimes 147;

Int'l BK Canada tim horton; Double Irish with Dutch Sandwich;Apple avoided 9B$ in taxes in 2012; OECD says 100-240B$/yr. GGl Dutch 99.8%; many #; 2014 Farm Bill 50% for food aid on US ships

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/propublica-nobody-actually-knows-rich/

eries: The Secret IRS Files

Inside the Tax Records of the .001%

Periodically, we get a glimpse into the financial lives of the ultrarich. A pro athlete signs a huge contract, a tech CEO sells a boatload of shares in their company, or a billionaire heir unloads a Manhattan penthouse. Based on these nuggets of information, the media speculates as to how much income the rich might bring in every year. But nobody actually knows.

Thanks to an analysis of its unprecedented trove of IRS data, ProPublica is revealing the 15 people who reported the most U.S. income on their taxes from 2013 to 2018, along with data for the rest of the top 400.

The analysis also shows how much they paid in federal income taxes — and it demonstrates how the American tax system, which theoretically makes the highest earners pay the highest income tax rates, fails to do so for the people at the very top of the income pyramid. The top 400 earners pay noticeably lower tax rates than the merely rich; and, if you include payroll taxes, a married couple making $200,000 a year could end up paying higher tax rates than a person making $200 million a year. (The full analysis is here; it includes selected names beyond the top 15.)

Names That Won’t Surprise You

Scan the names on the list of the top 15 income earners and you’re certain to recognize several names — or at least the names of the companies they founded. Bill Gates hasn’t been involved in the day-to-day operations of Microsoft for over a decade, yet he still earned the most during the years we studied, reporting an average yearly income of $2.85 billion — and an effective federal income tax rate of 18.4%. Steve Ballmer, his former colleague, is also a well-known public figure, both for his time as Microsoft CEO and his current ownership of the Los Angeles Clippers NBA team. Ballmer’s average annual reported income of $1.05 billion landed him in the 10th spot on the list, and his effective federal income tax rate was 14.1%. The other side of the PC/Mac wars is represented here by Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs. Her average reported income of $1.57 billion ranked fifth-highest; she paid an effective tax rate of 14.8%. (ProPublica sought comment from everyone mentioned in this article. Nobody disputed the numbers cited here. Unless otherwise noted, representatives for people named in this article either declined to comment, declined to comment on the record or did not respond to requests for comment.)

Another well-known billionaire sits just below Gates on the list: Media and tech mogul and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, with an average reported income of just over $2 billion, paid an effective income tax rate of 4.1%, by far the lowest rate among the top 15. (A spokesperson told ProPublica for an earlier article that Bloomberg “pays the maximum tax rate on all federal, state, local and international taxable income as prescribed by law,” and cited Bloomberg’s philanthropic giving.)

The presence of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — either the first- or second-wealthiest person in America, depending on the day — won’t shock most people, but Bezos’s annual reported income during these years of $832 million put him only at number 15. He paid an effective tax rate of 23.2%; as we’ve previously reported, Bezos had so little income in a couple of recent years that he was able to pay $0 in federal income taxes in those periods.

Who Are These Others and Why Are They Paying Higher Tax Rates?

Tech billionaires dominate the top 15, but hedge fund managers account for a full third of the names on this list, and some of their incomes were just as huge. Most of them paid relatively high effective tax rates, especially compared to most of the tech sector representatives. Hedge fund managers often make their money through short-term trades, which are taxed at a much higher rate than when tech titans cash in on long-term investments.

The highest-earning hedge funder is Ken Griffin, founder of the Chicago-based firm Citadel. From 2013 to 2018, he reported an average income of nearly $1.7 billion, putting him fourth on the list. Griffin paid a tax rate of 29.2% during these years. (A spokesperson for Griffin said the tax rates in the IRS data “significantly understate” what Griffin pays, because they were lowered by charitable contributions and do not reflect local and state taxes. He also said Griffin pays foreign taxes, which aren’t included in IRS calculations of effective tax rate.)

Israel Englander, co-founder of Millennium Management, paid at a 30.8% rate, while the co-founders of Two Sigma Investments, David Siegel and John Overdeck, paid tax rates of 31.6% and 34.2%, respectively.

Some of this variation in rates reflects how people structure their businesses under tax law. Income earned by publicly traded corporations is taxed at the company level. When it’s passed on to big shareholders, such as tech billionaires, it can come in the form of dividends, which are taxed at lower rates than ordinary income. By contrast, the income from some manufacturing companies and hedge funds flows directly to company owners, who pay taxes on it, resulting in higher effective tax rates on average.

Where Are the Heirs?

Lists of the world’s wealthiest individuals are always heavily populated by heirs, ranging from descendents of old money to scions of more recently minted fortunes. Dozens of heirs made ProPublica’s list of 400 biggest income earners. Descendents and relatives of Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, claim 11 spots.

The DeVos family, heirs to the Amway fortune, also have multiple members in the top 400. Perhaps the best known is Betsy DeVos, who served as U.S. secretary of education during the Donald Trump administration. With a reported annual income of $112 million, she was the 389th-highest earner in this period.

Much like the tech titans who top the list, most of these heirs get their income from dividends or long-term investments, which are taxed at a lower rate. Their effective tax rates ranged from as low as 10.6% for Betsy DeVos to a high of 23% paid by Walmart heir Tom Walton.

Don’t Forget the Deductions

Another key way that some top earners reduced their tax liability was to claim significant deductions, often in the form of large charitable contributions. This is particularly true for wealthy investors who are able to make their donations with shares of stock. Thanks to a generous provision of the tax code, they can then deduct the full value of the stock at its current price — without having to first sell it and pay capital gains tax.

Michael Bloomberg achieved a tax rate of 4.1% from 2013 to 2018 by taking annual deductions of more than $1 billion,mostly through charitable contributions. From 2013 to 2017, he also wrote off an average of $400 million each year from what he’d paid in state and local taxes. The 2018 tax overhaul limited that deduction to $10,000 — but also introduced a huge new deduction for pass-through companies that Bloomberg benefited from.

Wait — What About the Celebrities?

The earnings of actors, musicians and sports stars are a subject of nonstop scrutiny in the media, yet few celebrities cracked the list of the top 400 earners, which would have required them to report annual incomes of at least $110 million.

ProPublica’s trove has data on many celebrities. One who came close to the top 400 is basketball superstar LeBron James, who averaged $96 million a year in reported income. Grammy-winning singer Taylor Swift also came within reach of the top 400, averaging $82 million in reported income during these years. Actor George Clooney would have had to double his average income of $55 million to crack the top 400.

THE TOP 15

Here are the details on the top 15 income earners. Read the full analysis of the top 400 here.

For the full list of America’s top 400 income earners and their tax rates, along with our methodology, click here.

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see ducks unlimited trump gets wetlands tax writeoff for golf course?! farmers? (flood fields?)

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/billionaire/

comm dr

over the next few decades, the richest American families could avoid paying about $8.4 trillion in taxes, or more than four times the cost of the stalled Build Back Better package, according to a report released Wednesday.

The Americans for Tax Fairness report—entitled Dynasty Trusts: Giant Tax Loopholes that Supercharge Wealth Accumulation—urges Congress to fix the federal tax code to address dynastic wealth.

The new analysis details how loopholes have made the payment of estate, gift, and generation-skipping taxes—collectively called wealth-transfer taxes—effectively optional for the "ultrawealthy" and thereby accelerate the "accumulation of dynastic wealth."

"Ultrarich families use dynasty trusts—the term for a variety of wealth-accumulating structures that remain in place for multiple generations—to ensure their fortunes cascade down to children, grandchildren, and beyond undiminished by wealth-transfer taxes," the report explains.

Some U.S. states, such as South Dakota, have even changed their laws on dynasty trusts to attract wealthy residents, as Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy highlighted last year.

The new report notes that U.S. lawmakers aren't planning to address the issue, even if the Senate passes a version of a House-approved package:

The Build Back Better (BBB) legislation now before Congress—otherwise a vehicle for significant progressive tax reform—does nothing to directly reverse this toxic accumulation of dynastic wealth. Moreover, some dynasty trust reforms that were included in the bill passed by the House Ways and Means Committee in September 2021 were stripped out before the House voted on the measure in November.

The BBB bill needs full support from Senate Democrats to pass. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)—one of the primary reasons the legislation hasn't reached President Joe Biden's desk—said Tuesday that it is "dead."

However, Americans for Tax Fairnessstill uses the whittled-down BBB package to illustrate just how much money wealthy Americans can hoard for their families in the years ahead thanks to the U.S. tax system.

"The tax savings for the richest families could be about $8.4 trillion over the next 24 years or so if the current 40% estate tax rate remains in place," the report states. "That's the equivalent of more than four Build Back Better plans costing $1.75 trillion each over 10 years."

The report adds that "about half of the $8.4 trillion is equivalent to the cost of the expanded child tax credit, which was included in the House-passed BBB bill and is estimated to reduce childhood poverty by 40%, for 24 years at $160 billion a year." [twt]

"This hoarding of wealth is inexcusable," declared the report's principal author, Bob Lord, who practiced estate law for 30 years before joining Americans for Tax Fairness as tax counsel.

"The BBB legislation now before the U.S. Senate should be amended to close loopholes in the three components of America's wealth transfer tax system: the estate, gift, and generation-skipping tax," he asserted. "Effective reforms have already been developed—all that's needed is for Congress to recognize the urgency to act now."

The group's new analysis and call for action come after Americans for Tax Fairness estimated last month that the 10 wealthiest billionaires in the United States have become approximately $1 billion richer collectively every day of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Wednesday's report contains a warning about that group of ultra-billionaires, mentioning by name Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk of Telsa and SpaceX.

"As much as familiar fortunes have blossomed in the low-regulation, low-tax, wealth-worshiping environment of the previous 40 years," the report says, "the next 40 and beyond could see the rise of economic dynasties that will make the old money look small."

Along with closing dynasty-trust tax loopholes, Americans for Tax Fairness urges reforms that would "curb the year-to-year accumulation of wealth in existing trusts." Specifically, it calls for a new income-tax bracket "on undistributed trust income in excess of $250,000 that is five percentage points higher than the maximum income-tax bracket for individuals."

Noting a proposal from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the group also encourages U.S. lawmakers to "impose an annual 2% wealth tax on the portion of a dynasty trust's holdings that exceed $50 million, and an additional 1% on dynasty trust accumulations in excess of $1 billion."

"The choice is clear," according to the report. "We can fix our broken estate and gift tax system and stop the concentration of an ever-larger share of America's wealth inside enormous dynasty trusts, or we can trust our democracy to a handful of trillionaire trust fund babies."

"Fortunately, we know what needs to be done," the report concludes. "The sole remaining challenge is to summon the courage to stand up to the holders of dynastic wealth and their enablers."

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on-shore tax haven trust "settlers"

https://kpfa.org/episode/economic-update-november-19-2021/

1 trillion hid in south dakota

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/oil-spill/

pro publ

Series: The Secret IRS Files

Inside the Tax Records of the .001%

After the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig exploded in 2010, environmentalists surveying the damage in the Gulf of Mexico came upon a mystery. The water had oil slicks that, because of the currents, couldn’t have originated from the site of the notorious accident.

With the help of satellite imagery, they figured out that oil was leaking from a different spill, a six-year-old disaster the public knew almost nothing about. In September 2004, Hurricane Ivan had swept the legs out from under a 40-story oil-drilling platform operated by a company called Taylor Energy, causing a leak that continues to this day. It is the longest-running — and by one estimate, the largest — U.S. oil spill ever recorded, a contentious saga that prompted a recent “60 Minutes” segment.

It’s been an environmental nightmare for the region — but a massive tax bonanza for Phyllis Taylor, the owner of Taylor Energy and the fallen rig.

According to ProPublica’s analysis of a secret trove of tax data, from 2005 to 2018, Taylor took in some $444 million in income, most of it from wages, interest, dividends and capital gains, and didn’t pay a cent in federal income tax.

That’s in significant measure because she was able to transform money her company was compelled to spend cleaning up the oil spill into a perfectly legal nine-figure tax write-off for herself.

Representatives for Taylor, now 80, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Taylor is part of a set of ultrawealthy Americans who manage to avoid federal income taxes for years on end by using their businesses or leisure interests to throw off enough deductions to offset the millions or even billions of dollars they make. We’ve nicknamed the group the biggest losers. Taylor’s story shows just how lucrative it can be to be a member of that particular club.

Patrick Taylor, Phyllis Taylor’s husband, founded Taylor Energy in 1979. He would eventually become the richest man in Louisiana and enjoyed the sort of lifestyle that went with the title. He raced speedboats on the Mississippi, rode bulls in rodeos and skydived more than 500 times. But he often said he preferred to be known for his role in advocating for the creation of a beloved state program that provided scholarships to Louisiana colleges and universities.

Taylor Energy operated out of an ornate four-story mansion in New Orleans, off Lee Circle, where a statue of Robert E. Lee stood until 2017. Female employees were not allowed to wear pants, and employees addressed their superiors as “sir” or “ma’am.” Patrick’s office had hand-painted blue-and-white silk wallpaper from a Russian palace, while a nearby dining room featured marble fountains from an 18th-century French chateau. Rooms were named after Ronald Reagan and the British naval hero Admiral Horatio Nelson.

Phyllis cut an unusual figure in the world of brash wildcatters. She started out in the business working for another Louisiana oilman, sometimes being mistaken for his coffee-bearing assistant before he surprised the men in the room by announcing she was his attorney. She married Patrick Taylor in 1964 and served on the board of directors of Taylor Energy while he ran the company.

Deemed the “gentle dove” of Louisiana for her philanthropy, Phyllis Taylor supported local education and art institutions, as well as housing for the homeless. She loved to travel, and in an interview with Condé Nast Traveler, extolled the joys of circumnavigating the world: “The difference between a short cruise and a world cruise is night and day, storm and calm, fleeting thought and thoughtfulness. With an extended cruise you absorb the lifestyle of life at sea; with the great advantage of having a crew and staff that treats you like royalty.” A frequent hunter, Taylor proudly displayed the skin and head of a leopard she shot in Zambia.

The year Ivan hit changed Phyllis Taylor’s life. A couple of months after the hurricane, her husband died at age 67. At 63, she took over the company.

Deaths create a spectacular tax boon for the wealthy, what some experts consider one of the largest loopholes in the code.

Taylor Energy had ballooned in value in the 25 years since its founding. If Patrick Taylor, who controlled the vast majority of the company, had sold it while he was alive, the Taylors would have owed a huge sum in capital gains tax. But all of that value disappeared at death for the purposes of taxes thanks to a widely decried provision of the code that will cost the U.S. Treasury more than $500 billion in lost taxes over the next decade. Phyllis inherited the company and became the wealthiest woman in Louisiana, worth an estimated $1.6 billion. There’s no estate tax for property transferred to a spouse.

In 2008, four years after Taylor Energy became aware of the spill, the company had yet to clean it up. Taylor decided she wanted out of the business. She sold all of the company’s oil rigs and other assets, except for the damaged rig, to two South Korean entities. Taylor, who owned about 95% of the company, according to her former CEO, received close to $1.2 billion of the roughly $1.25 billion price tag.

Yet Taylor was legally allowed to portray the sale to the IRS in a very different light — and that in turn depended on the fact that the law allows owners of private companies a lot of leeway in determining the value of their assets. Since Taylor was inheriting the company tax-free, she and her advisors had every reason to assign it a high initial value, because that would mean that when she later sold the assets, the high value would minimize or eliminate the gain on paper. “When property is transferred between spouses at death, there’s a tax incentive to aggressively value it on the high end,” said Gregg Polsky, a tax law professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, who has been retained as a consultant to ProPublica.

Taylor’s tax records suggest that’s what happened. Taylor did not record a gain on the sale of her company. In fact, she was able to report a loss of $211 million.

It’s difficult for outsiders to value a private company. But a former company insider said Taylor Energy was sold at a premium. “I did the valuation. I know what the assets were worth and know what we sold them for. We did not take a loss. Period,” John Pope, Taylor Energy’s former CEO, told ProPublica.

The upshot of the claimed loss was that Taylor paid no federal income tax in a year when she realized an enormous gain from the sale. She even got a remarkable extra goodie: refunds on $30 million in taxes she’d paid in previous years.

After the 2008 sale, what was left of Taylor Energy was devoted to one thing only, cleaning up the spill. The company had professed to be trying to plug the leaking oil well but seemed to make no progress.

A few months after the sale, the federal agency that oversees drilling in the Gulf negotiated an agreement that required the company to create a $666 million trust to cover the cost of the cleanup.

That was a lot of money — more than half of the proceeds from the company’s sale — but it came with a silver lining. Because Taylor Energy was set up as a sole proprietorship, its income and losses flowed through to Phyllis’ personal taxes. She could write off the costs of the cleanup against her own income.

It may be surprising that the costs of cleaning up an environmental disaster are tax-deductible. But such write-offs are legal, qualifying as “ordinary and necessary” business expenses. By contrast, fines and penalties are not deductible. Oil giant BP was able to deduct most of the settlement it reached with the government over the Deepwater Horizon spill because much of it went to address the environmental calamity, rather than to penalties for wrongdoing.

Such deductions are unobtainable for executives or shareholders at publicly traded corporations, where only the company gets to deduct the expenses.

It took years for the extent of the spill to become known. Taylor disclosed almost nothing about the accident and fought public records requests. The reality unspooled thanks to the persistence of environmental groups, investigative reporting, and revelations from a dizzying array of suits and countersuits.

In the years after it established the cleanup trust, Taylor Energy claimed that it could not have foreseen such an accident and that stopping the leak was technologically impossible. In 2012, the Coast Guard finally ordered Taylor to install a dome to contain the leak, but three years later, when Taylor Energy settled a lawsuit that forced it to start publicly disclosing more about its efforts, the company had not even finished the design.

According to a later review by the Coast Guard, Taylor Energy was “obstinate, difficult to deal with and verbally combative,” and preferred “to employ stall tactics over cooperation with an intention to confuse, delay or misdirect” the government.

In 2015, The Associated Press revealed that both Taylor and the government had dramatically underestimated the volume of the leak. The Coast Guard released a new estimate, much higher than its previous ones and 20 times the roughly 4 gallons a day Taylor was claiming. In a lawsuit, a federal expert put it higher still, estimating the spill to be up to 29,400 gallons a day. That would mean that starting in 2004, more oil spilled into the Gulf from Taylor Energy’s rig than the estimated 130 million gallons that gushed into it as a result of BP’s Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.

For more than a decade, Taylor Energy has launched a series of legal actions against the government to try to recoup at least a portion of the money in the trust or to end its cleanup obligations, saying it has done all that it could. The company has come up empty every time. Rather than put resources into fixing the problem, Taylor has been “putting all of its money and efforts into fighting the cleanup,” said Brettny Hardy, a senior attorney for Earthjustice, an environmental group.

Today the oil is still flowing at a rate of about 1,000 gallons a day. A protective dome, finally installed by a contractor the Coast Guard hired after losing faith in Taylor, contains the leak.

Taylor has weathered all of this remarkably well. She remains known as a great benefactor to her city and state. Praising her philanthropy, the U.S. Marine Corps gave her honorary marine status in 2013, and The Times-Picayune granted her its “Loving Cup” award in 2016.

The combination of the loss on the sale of the company and the expenses from the cleanup meant Taylor did not pay any income taxes from 2005 through 2018. At the end of 2018, her reserve pool of losses exceeded $330 million, making it a distinct possibility that she would never have to pay income taxes again.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/how-wealth-inequality-spiraled-out-of-control/

no lnx vid

How wealth inequality spiraled out of control

Robert Reich and Robert Reich's Blog November 04, 2021

Elon Musk's wealth has surpassed $200 billion. It would take the median U.S. worker over 4 million years to make that much.

Wealth inequality is eating this country alive. We're now in America's second Gilded Age, just like the late 19th century when a handful of robber barons monopolized the economy, kept wages down, and bribed lawmakers.

While today's robber barons take joy rides into space, the distance between their gargantuan wealth and the financial struggles of working Americans has never been clearer. During the first 19 months of the pandemic, U.S. billionaires added $2.1 trillion dollars to their collective wealth and that number continues to rise.

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And the rich have enough political power to cut their taxes to almost nothing — sometimes literally nothing. In fact, Jeff Bezos paid no federal income taxes in 2007 or in 2011. By 2018, the 400 richest Americans paid a lower overall tax rate than almost anyone else.

But we can not solve this problem unless we know how it was created in the first place.

Let's start with the basics.

I. The Basics

Wealth inequality in America is far larger than income inequality.

Income is what you earn each week or month or year. Wealth refers to the sum total of your assets — your car, your stocks and bonds, your home, art — anything else you own that's valuable. Valuable not only because there's a market for it — a price other people are willing to pay to buy it — but because wealth itself grows.

As the population expands and the nation becomes more productive, the overall economy continues to expand. This expansion pushes up the values of stocks, bonds, rental property, homes, and most other assets. Of course recessions and occasional depressions can reduce the value of such assets. But over the long haul, the value of almost all wealth increases.

Lesson: Wealth compounds over time.

Next: personal wealth comes from two sources.The first source is the income you earn but don't spend. That's your savings. When you invest those savings in stocks, bonds, or real property or other assets, you create your personal wealth — which, as we've seen, grows over time.

The second source of personal wealth is whatever is handed down to you from your parents, grandparents, and maybe even generations before them — in other words, what you inherit.

Lesson: Personal wealth comes from your savings and/or your inheritance.

II. Why the wealth gap is exploding

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The wealth gap between the richest Americans and everyone else is staggering.

In the 1970s, the wealthiest 1 percent owned about 20 percent of the nation's total household wealth. Now, they own over 35 percent.

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Much of their gains over the last 40 years have come from a dramatic increase in the value of shares of stock.

For example, if someone invested $1,000 in 1978 in a broad index of stocks — say, the S&P 500 — they would have $31,823 today, adjusted for inflation.

Who has benefited from this surge? The richest 1 percent, who now own half of the entire stock market. But the typical worker's wages have barely grown.

Most Americans haven't earned enough to save anything. Before the pandemic, when the economy appeared to be doing well, almost 80 percent were living paycheck to paycheck.

Lesson: Most Americans don't make enough to save money and build wealth.

So as income inequality has widened, the amount that the few high-earning households save — their wealth — has continued to grow. Their growing wealth has allowed them to pass on more and more wealth to their heirs.

Take, for example, the Waltons — the family behind the Walmart empire — which has seven heirs on the Forbes billionaires list. Their children, and other rich millennials, will soon consolidate even more of the nation's wealth. America is now on the cusp of the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history. As wealthy boomers pass on, somewhere between $30 to $70 trillion will go to their children over the next three decades.

These children will be able to live off of this wealth, and then leave the bulk of it — which will continue growing — to their own children … tax-free. After a few generations of this, almost all of America's wealth could be in the hands of a few thousand families.

Lesson: Dynastic wealth continues to grow.

III. Why wealth concentration is a problem

Concentrated wealth is already endangering our democracy. Wealth doesn't just beget more wealth — it begets more power.

Dynastic wealth concentrates power into the hands of fewer and fewer people, who can choose what nonprofits and charities to support and which politicians to bankroll. This gives an unelected elite enormous sway over both our economy and our democracy.

If this keeps up, we'll come to resemble the kind of dynasties common to European aristocracies in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

Dynastic wealth makes a mockery of the idea that America is a meritocracy, where anyone can make it on the basis of their own efforts. It also runs counter to the basic economic ideas that people earn what they're worth in the market, and that economic gains should go to those who deserve them.

Finally, wealth concentration magnifies gender and race disparities because women and people of color tend to make less, save less, and inherit less.

The typical single woman owns only 32 cents of wealth for every dollar of wealth owned by a man. The pandemic likely increased this gap.

The racial wealth gap is even starker. The typical Black household owns just 13 cents of wealth for every dollar of wealth owned by the typical white household. The pandemic likely increased this gap, too.

In all these ways, dynastic wealth creates a self-perpetuating aristocracy that runs counter to the ideals we claim to live by.

Lesson: Dynastic wealth creates a self-perpetuating aristocracy.

IV. How America dealt with wealth inequality during the First Gilded Age

The last time America faced anything comparable to the concentration of wealth we face today was at the turn of the 20th century. That was when President Teddy Roosevelt warned that "a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power" could destroy American democracy.

Roosevelt's answer was to tax wealth. Congress enacted two kinds of wealth taxes. The first, in 1916, was the estate tax — a tax on the wealth someone has accumulated during their lifetime, paid by the heirs who inherit that wealth.

The second tax on wealth, enacted in 1922, was a capital gains tax — a tax on the increased value of assets, paid when those assets are sold.

Lesson: The estate tax and the capital gains tax were created to curb wealth concentration.

But both of these wealth taxes have shrunk since then, or become so riddled with loopholes that they haven't been able to prevent a new American aristocracy from emerging.

The Trump Republican tax cut enabled individuals to exclude $11.18 million from their estate taxes. That means one couple can pass on more than $22 million to their kids tax-free.Not to mention the very rich often find ways around this tax entirely. As Trump's former White House National Economic Council director Gary Cohn put it, "only morons pay the estate tax."

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What about capital gains on the soaring values of wealthy people's stocks, bonds, mansions, and works of art? Here, the biggest loophole is something called the "stepped-up basis." If the wealthy hold on to these assets until they die, their heirs inherit them without paying any capital gains taxes whatsoever. All the increased value of those assets is simply erased, for tax purposes. This loophole saves heirs an estimated $40 billion a year.

This means that huge accumulations of wealth in the hands of a relatively few households can be passed from generation to generation untaxed — growing along the way — generating comfortable incomes for rich descendants who will never have to work a day of their lives. That's the dynastic class we're creating right now.

Lesson: The estate tax and the capital gains tax have been gutted.

Why have these two wealth taxes eroded? Because, as America's wealth has concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the wealthy have more capacity to donate to political campaigns and public relations — and they've used that political power to reduce their taxes. It's exactly what Teddy Roosevelt feared so many years ago.

V. How to reduce the wealth gap

So what do we do? Follow the wisdom of Teddy Roosevelt and tax great accumulations of wealth.

The ultra-rich have benefited from the American system — from laws that protect their wealth, and our economy that enabled them to build their fortunes in the first place. They should pay their fair share.

The majority of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, believe the ultra rich should pay higher taxes. There are many ways to make them do so: closing the stepped up basis loophole, raising the capital gains tax, and fully funding the Internal Revenue Service so it can properly audit the wealthiest taxpayers, for starters.

Beyond those fixes, we need a new wealth tax: a tax of just 2 percent a year on wealth in excess of $1 million. That's hardly a drop in the bucket for centi-billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, but would generate plenty of revenue to invest in healthcare and education so that millions of Americans have a fair shot at making it.

One of the most important things you as an individual can do is take the time to understand the realities of wealth inequality in America and how the system has become rigged in favor of those at the top — and demand your political representatives take action to unrig it.

Wealth inequality is worse than it has been in a century – and it has contributed to a vicious political-economic cycle in which taxes are cut on the top, resulting in even more concentration of wealth there – while everyone else lives under the cruelest form of capitalism in the world.

We must stop this vicious cycle — and demand an economy that works for the many, not one that concentrates more and more wealth in the hands of a privileged few.

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The speed with which a tax on billionaires came and went as a means to pay for President Joe Biden's economic agenda shows why it's so hard to tax wealth in the U.S.

Democrats unveiled their proposal on Oct. 27, 2021, and it was nixed that same day, replaced with a surcharge on millionaire incomes.

The idea of taxing the richest Americans' fortunes has been batted around for some time, and perhaps with good reason from a tax perspective. The total wealth of U.S. billionaires soared by US$1.8 trillion during the COVID-19 pandemic as of mid-August. And recent reporting has found that despite their massive riches, billionaires tend to pay very little in taxes.

As an expert on tax policy, I have observed that there's a big obstacle standing in the way of a wealth tax: the Constitution.

Income and wealth inequality

Concerns about inequality have increased in recent decades.

Americans enjoyed substantial economic growth and broadly shared prosperity from the end of World War II into the 1970s.

But in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan dramatically slashed taxes on the wealthy – twice – cutting the top rate on wages from 70% to 28%.

Studies have shown lower income and corporate tax rates, combined with other “trickle-down" policies such as deregulation, have led to steadily rising income for the richest Americans and wealth inequality.

The most affluent 1% controlled 39% of all wealth – including all cash, real estate, stocks, bonds and other investments – in 2016, up from less than 30% in 1989. At the same time, the bottom 90% held less than a quarter of America's wealth, compared with more than a third in 1989.

Currently, the federal government taxes all income above $518,400 at 37% for single filers, with an additional 3.8% investment tax on incomes over $200,000. Of course, as a ProPublica cache of tax documents shows, loopholes and tax dodges result in actual income tax rates being significantly lower.

The problem with taxing wealth

Unlike an income tax, a wealth tax reaches the root of both wealth and income inequality.

But there are strong arguments that a federal wealth tax is unconstitutional. Wealth taxes violate Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, which forbids the federal government from assessing “direct taxes" that aren't apportioned equally among the states.

A direct tax is a tax on a thing, like property or income. An indirect tax is a tax on a transaction: for example, a sale or a gift.

The income tax is a direct tax and constitutional because of the 16th Amendment, which specifically allows income taxes without apportionment. As for property, you may notice that only states and cities levy real estate taxes. In almost every case, the federal government cannot tax real estate or any other form of wealth absent a transaction.

Proponents of a wealth tax, such as U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, cite a small group of law professors who back her claim that a wealth tax passes constitutional muster. But the argument against constitutionality is strong enough that a Supreme Court challenge is sure to follow any attempt to enact a wealth tax.

Barring a victory before the conservative-leaning Supreme Court or an arduous amendment to the Constitution, the federal government is shut out of taxing wealth.

A rising tide

I agree with progressive lawmakers that the United States should return to economic policies that seek to lift all boats.

Although American wealth and productivity have surged in the past 40 years, most Americans have not seen their lot improve nearly as much as the richest have – and are paying higher tax rates. In 2020 alone, America's billionaires saw their wealth increase $560 billion, even as tens of millions were unemployed or depended on food donations to get enough to eat.

The U.S. tax system is at least partly responsible for these gaps. While a wealth tax may not be a workable solution, there are other means, such as higher income tax rates for the well-to-do or a wealth transfer tax that focuses on the transfer of wealth to a billionaire's heirs. These approaches could not only help solve the problem of inequality but would pass legal muster too.

This is an updated version of an article published on June 9, 2021.

Beverly Moran, Professor Emerita of Law, Vanderbilt University

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KYRSTEN SINEMA USED THE WINERY WHERE SHE INTERNED TO FUNDRAISE WITH PRIVATE EQUITY

The Arizona senator, who is blocking tax increases on the rich, spent the summer courting donors who stand to lose under major tax reform.

Daniel BoguslawDaniel Boguslaw

September 26 2021,

THE DEMOCRATIC SENATOR threatening to block the party’s ambitious social policy agenda in order to preserve former President Donald Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and for the wealthy spent last summer interning at a winery owned by the private equity baron Bill Price.

In the summer of 2020, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., interned at Three Sticks, a winery in Sonoma, California, owned by Bill Price, co-founder of the private equity leviathan TPG Capital. According to the job description, interns “assist in all facets of harvest work including cleaning and sanitizing equipment, sorting fruit, punchdowns, making basic additions and managing fermentations according to winemaker instructions, barrel work, and other winery-related tasks.”

Sinema’s personal financial disclosures show that she was paid $1,117.40 in wages for her work. But an ensuing fundraiser at Three Sticks, held in August, netted her campaign coffers much more.

Sinema has told Democratic colleagues, according to the New York Times, that she will oppose any tax increases on either corporate or personal rates, essential pillars of the legislation. Her opposition to tax hikes on the rich comes amid a major spending blitz to encourage her to stand against any tax increases on private equity executives or hedge funds.

The same summer that Sinema completed her internship, Three Sticks was one of three stops on a weekend fundraising tour. Tickets to the fundraiser cost $5,000 per guest, with contributions going toward both her own campaign committee and the Getting Things Done political action committee, a leadership PAC used to support fellow congressional moderates such as New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer. Sinema courted major donors that summer, including Lyft CEO Logan Green, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and of course Price himself, who contributed $5,000.

In the past two years, Sinema has received tens of thousands of dollars in maxed out donations from private equity partners like Price and investment firm CEOs.Now, many of those same senior firm executives stand to lose millions to the IRS if a bill targeting the carried interest tax loophole is included as part of the Senate’s budget reconciliation process. Those executive donors include senior directors at TPG and billionaire Blackstone CEO Jonathan Gray.

Sponsored by Sens. Ron Wyden and Sheldon Whitehouse, the Ending the Carried Interest Loophole Act would require hedge fund managers and private equity executives to pay taxes on their income at the same rates as other workers, ending favored treatment for such executives. Right now, their compensation is not considered income. It is instead classified as a tax deferrable capital gain, subject to far lower rates, despite its near-identical function.

In June, the private equity industry lobby launched a pressure campaign targeting Sinema and fellow Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly to leave the carried interest tax loophole intact.

The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the bill would raise more than $63 billion over 10 years, serving as an important part of the pay for — the taxes used to offset new spending — in Democrats’ proposed $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation plan. Sinema has repeatedly described the plan as too expensive.

Multiple congressional aides who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity said that Sinema’s office has been silent on whether or not she will support closing the loophole, despite her concern over the price tag of her party’s budget reconciliation bill and the vast sums the carried interest tax could raise.

BEFORE OPENING HIS winery, Price co-founded TPG, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, in 1992. Despite announcing his departure from TPG in 2006, Price listed TPG as his employer on a 2020 Federal Election Commission filing with the title of “partner emeritus.” A spokesperson for Price told The Intercept, “Bill Price no longer has any affiliation with TPG and has not for a decade.” When shown a copy of the FEC filing, the same spokesperson did not respond for further comment. In 2019, during the college admissions pay-to-play scandal, Price’s connection to the firm resurfaced when he defended Bill McGlashan, the husband of his wife’s sister and a senior TPG partner he brought to the firm in 2004. TPG did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Last week, Sinema announced explicit opposition to yet another critical budget reconciliation revenue mechanism:Democrats’ drug pricing plan,which various estimates say could save the government between $450 and $700 billion over 10 years. In July, Sen. Mitch McConnell called Sinema’s rejection of the budget reconciliation price tag “very courageous.”

As The Daily Poster first reported, Sinema, who has raised over $500,000 from the pharmaceutical and health products industry, was featured in ads by a pharma-funded dark-money group just before she went public with her opposition to drug pricing legislation. Data from the Center for Responsive Politics shows that since entering Congress, Sinema has also grossed well over $6 million in donations from the finance, insurance, and real estate industry.

Earlier this month, the Chamber of Commerce put out a report claiming that closing the carried interest tax loophole would cost almost 5 million jobs and create billions in tax shortfalls.

“The carried interest loophole rewards one narrow class of workers, fund managers, whose compensation already is in the stratosphere compared to almost everyone else, with a deeply discounted income tax rate. It’s indefensible,” Bob Lord, tax counsel at Americans for Tax Fairness, told The Intercept.

“Carried interest also allows fund managers to defer tax on their compensation until the fund’s investments are sold. The rest of us pay tax on our labor income currently, not years later,” Lord said. “Apologists at the Chamber of Commerce justify this travesty with claims the country would lose jobs if fund managers paid tax at the same rate as the rest of us. By that logic, why wouldn’t we reduce their rate to zero? More jobs, right? Or perhaps the IRS should pay them? Even more jobs, right? How any member of Congress would take the Chamber of Commerce seriously here mystifies me.”

COMPARED TO HER Democratic colleagues and corporate donors, Sinema’s personal financial disclosures are sparse. Her 2020 filing lists two retirement plans, adormant consulting business, and income generated from a teaching job at Arizona State University alongside her paltry internship income. This places Sinema’s personal finances in sharp contrast to the income generated by congressional allies like Joe Manchin, who has grossed millions from his coal interests over the course of the past decade.

When it comes to raising campaign cash though, few outmatch Sinema’s zeal for fundraisers and phone banking. According to multiple Democrats who served with Sinema in the House, she was the only member who seemed to actively love being in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee call center, claiming a couch for her sole personal use and complaining to other members when they had to leave to vote.

In 2020, she delivered a keynote speech followed by a fundraiser at SFVegas, the lavish securities conference held at the Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas and featured in the film “The Big Short.” Former British Prime Minister Theresa May headlined last year’s conference.

Sinema gave a keynote address at a Women in Securitization event before a fundraising reception sponsored by the Structured Finance PAC, which has donated tens of thousands of dollars to powerful members of the House Financial Services Committee such as Reps. Gregory Meeks and Carolyn Maloney. Sinema’s recent votes and public posturing suggest that the cash and advertising blitz launched by financial industry lobbyists may have achieved their intended effect.

In August, Sinema was the only Democrat to vote against an amendment to “establish a reserve fund relating to protecting family farms, ranches, and small businesses while ensuring the wealthy pay their fair share.” A day later, she voted against “a reserve fund relating to increasing the progressivity of the tax code.”

Sinema’s dramatic rightward shift toward the barons of finance and pharmaceuticals at the cost of progressive tax reform stands in sharp contrast to her childhood origin story, in which she talks about having grown up in an abandoned gas station without electricity or running water, at one point living out of a car.

In response to a colleague’s expression of support after anNPR story detailing her family’s struggles with financial hardship, Sinema, then a representative, speaking to colleagues in the Democratic cloakroom just off the House floor, deadpanned: “Yeah, voters love that stupid shit. They eat it up.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/erik-prince/

Series: The Secret IRS Files

Inside the Tax Records of the .001%

It's well known, at least among tax lawyers and accountants for the ultrawealthy: The estate tax can be easily avoided by exploiting a loophole unwittingly created by Congress three decades ago. By using special trusts, a rarefied group of Americans has taken advantage of this loophole, reducing government revenues and fueling inequality.

There is no way for the public to know who uses these special trusts aside from when they've been disclosed in lawsuits or securities filings. There's also been no way to quantify just how much in estate tax has been lost to them, though, in 2013, the lawyer who pioneered the use of the most common one — known as thegrantor retained annuity trust, or GRAT — estimated they may have cost the U.S. Treasury about $100 billion over the prior 13 years.

As Congress considers cracking down on GRATs and other trusts to help fund President Joe Biden's domestic agenda, a new analysis by ProPublica based on a trove of tax information about thousands of the wealthiest Americans sheds light on just how widespread the use of special trusts to dodge the estate tax has become.

More than half of the nation's 100 richest individuals have used GRATs and other trusts to avoid estate tax, the analysis shows. Among them: former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg; Leonard Lauder, the son of cosmetics magnate Estée Lauder; Stephen Schwarzman, a founder of the private equity firm Blackstone; Charles Koch and his late brother, David, the industrialists who have underwritten libertarian causes and funded lobbying efforts to roll back the estate tax; and Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs.(Powell Jobs' Emerson Collective is among ProPublica's largest donors.)

More than a century ago amid soaring inequality and the rise of stratospherically wealthy families such as the Mellons and Rockefellers, Congress created the estate tax as a way to raise money and clip the fortunes of the rich at death. Lawmakers later added a gift tax as a means of stopping wealthy people from passing their fortunes on to their children and grandchildren before death. Nowadays, 99.9% of Americans never have to worry about these taxes. They only hit individuals passing more than $11.7 million, or couples giving more than $23.4 million, to their heirs. The federal government imposes a roughly 40% levy on amounts above those figures before that wealth is passed on to heirs.

For her part, Powell Jobs has decried as “dangerous for a society" the early 20th century fortunes of the Mellons, Rockefellers and others. “I'm not interested in legacy wealth buildings, and my children know that," she told The New York Times last year. “Steve wasn't interested in that. If I live long enough, it ends with me."

Nonetheless, after the death of her husband in 2011, Powell Jobs used a series of GRATs to pass on around a half a billion dollars, estate-tax-free, to her children, friends and other family, according to the tax records and interviews with her longtime attorney. By using the GRATs, she avoided at least $200 million in estate and gift taxes.

Her attorney, Larry Sonsini, said Powell Jobs did this so that her children would have cash to pay estate taxes when she dies and they inherit “nostalgic and hard assets," such as real estate, art and a yacht. (At 260 feet, Venus is among the larger pleasure ships in the world.) Without the $500 million or so passed through the trusts, he said, Powell Jobs' heirs would have to sell stock that she intends to give to charity to pay her estate tax bill.

Sonsini said Powell Jobs, whose fortune is pegged at $21 billion by Forbes, has already given billions away to charity and paid $2.5 billion in state and federal taxes between 2012 and 2020. “When you look at an estate that may be worth multiple billions, and all the rest is going to charity, and you put it in perspective, what is the problem we're worried about here?" Sonsini asked. “This is not about creating dynasty wealth for these kids."

In a written statement, Powell Jobs said she supports “reforms that make the tax code more fair. Through my work at Emerson Collective and philanthropic commitments, I have dedicated my life and assets to the pursuit of a more just and equitable society."

Others whose special trusts ProPublica identified, including Bloomberg and the Kochs,declined to comment on why they'd set up the trusts or their estate-tax implications. Representatives for Lauder didn't respond to requests to accept questions on his behalf. Schwarzman's spokesperson wrote that he is “one of the largest individual taxpayers in the country and fully complies with all tax rules."

A typical GRAT entails putting assets, like stocks, in a trust that ultimately benefits a person's heirs. The trust pays back an amount equal to what the trust's creator put in plus a modest amount of interest. But any gains on the investments above that amount flow to the heirs free of gift or estate taxes. So if a person puts $100 million worth of stock in a GRAT and the stock rises in value to $130 million, their heirs would receive about $30 million tax-free.

In 1990, Congress accidentally created GRATs when it closed another estate tax loophole that was popular at the time. The IRS challenged the maneuver but lost in court.

“I don't blame the taxpayers who are doing it," said Daniel Hemel, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. “Congress has virtually invited them to do it. I blame Congress for creating the monster and then failing to stop the monster once it became clear how much of the tax base the GRAT monster would eat up."

Users of the trusts extend well beyond the top of the Forbes rankings, ProPublica's analysis of the confidential IRS files show. Erik Prince, founder of the military contractor Blackwater and himself heir to an auto parts fortune, used the shelter. Fashion designer Calvin Klein has used them, as have “Saturday Night Live" creator Lorne Michaels and media mogul Oprah Winfrey.

“We have paid all taxes due," a spokesperson for Winfrey said. A representative of Klein did not accept questions from ProPublica or respond to messages. A spokesman for Michaels declined to comment.

Prince also did not answer questions. “Hey if you publish private information about me I'll be sure to return the favor," he wrote. “Go ahead and fuck off."

The GRAT has become so ubiquitous in recent decades that high-end tax lawyers consider it a plain vanilla strategy. “This is an off-the-shelf solution," said Michael Kosnitzky, co-leader of the private wealth practice at law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. “Almost every wealthy person should have one."

ProPublica's tally almost certainly undercounts the number of Forbes 100 members who use shelters to avoid estate taxes. ProPublica counted only those people whose tax records or public filings explicitly mention GRATs or other trusts commonly used to dodge gift and estate taxes. But a wealthy person can call their trusts whatever they want, leaving plenty of trusts outside of ProPublica's count.

This month, the House and Senate are hammering out proposals to raise revenue to help pay for the Biden administration's plans to expand the social safety net. The legislative blueprint released by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., would defang GRATs and other trusts, which would still be legal but no longer be as useful for estate tax avoidance. If the provision makes it into law, “it would put a major dent in GRATs," said Bob Lord, an Arizona attorney who specializes in trusts and estates.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has proposed going further in undercutting estate tax avoidance tools. But the prospect of any reform is uncertain, as Democrats on Capitol Hill struggle to find the votes to pass the package of spending and tax changes.

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GRATs are commonly described by tax lawyers as a “heads I win, tails we tie" proposition. If the investment placed in the GRAT soars in value, that increase passes to an heir without being subject to future estate tax. If the investment doesn't go up, the wealthy person can simply try again and again until they succeed, leading many users to have multiple GRATs going at a time....

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an ah 921

In order to fund his "human infrastructure" proposals, President Joe Biden has recommended increasing taxes on the wealthiest Americans — including inheritance taxes. Republicans and corporate lobbyists are claiming that doing so would punish blue-collar businesses.But liberal Washington Post opinion writer Greg Sargent, this week in his column, notes that this claim is also being promoted by a centrist Democrat: former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, now a lobbyist.

"Of all the insulting lies we've heard about Democratic proposals to tax the rich," Sargent writes, "perhaps the worst is the idea that they would devastate owners and operators of family farms…. As president, Donald Trump embellished this further, adding the idea that estate taxes threaten salt-of-the-earth family-owned trucking businesses. Now, a new version of this line is back — only this time, it's being pushed by a Democrat who's advocating against a key tax provision in President Biden's $3.5 trillion 'human infrastructure' plan."

Sargent continues, "A swarm of lobbyists is gearing up against Democratic efforts to tax corporations and the wealthy to fund major investments in our people and in preserving the future home of human civilization. One thing the lobbyists want to protect is a loophole allowing untold inherited wealth to escape taxation."

The New York Times recently reported that Democratic proponents of Biden's inheritance tax proposals are saying that rural swing voters would not be affected by them. But Heitkamp, according to Sargent, is "pushing the argument that taxation at death is bad politics."

Sargent argues that the lobbying against Biden's tax proposals isn't motivated by a desire to protect family farms and blue-collar businesses, but to shield the ultra-wealthy from the taxes they are dodging.

"As it is, wealth and investment income are not taxed as labor income is," Sargent explains. "So, those amassing large fortunes often already receive privileged tax treatment. But in addition, when estates are passed down to heirs, for tax purposes, assets are assigned the value they have at that point of transfer. If assets are then sold later, they're taxed based on their appreciation in value from that point, effectively allowing all the appreciation before then to permanently escape taxation. This is one way billionaires can get away with paying so little in income taxes relative to their wealth, whereas most Americans have income taxes taken from each paycheck."

Sargent adds, "Biden's plan would combat this. It would tax those assets based on their appreciation from the original point of acquisition, thus taxing all that unrealized value. That's what lobbyists want to prevent. One of them is Heidi Heitkamp, the former Democratic senator from North Dakota."

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/companies-lobbying-against-infrastructure-tax-hikes-have-dodged-millions-in-taxes-report/

President Joe Biden's American Jobs Plan proposal would raise the United States' corporate tax rate to 28% in order to pay for infrastructure projects. Some large corporations, journalist Akela Lacy stresses in an article published by The Intercept on September 6, have been aggressively lobbying against that proposal — and they include everything from pharmaceutical companies to financial firms, some of which dodged a fortune in taxes.

"Companies that…. lobbied earlier this year on issues related to tax rates in Biden's American Jobs Plan include Walmart, Oracle, Accenture, Bristol Myers Squibb, Shell and Walgreens, according to an analysis by Accountable.US, a nonpartisan watchdog group focused on public corruption," Lacy explains. "Executives at companies that have historically avoided paying taxes, like Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase, FedEx, and DuPont, have spoken out publicly against Biden's proposed tax increases."

Lacy continues, "Shell and Walgreens lobbied earlier this year on corporate tax issues in the American Jobs Plan. Walmart hired a lobbying firm tasked with 'monitoring of tax proposals related to infrastructure' in the plan and proposed legislative efforts related to Donald Trump's 2017 tax cuts. Accenture hired another firm to 'monitor the American Jobs Plan as it relates to corporate taxes.' Oracle and Bristol Myers Squibb, a multinational pharmaceutical company, used the same firm hired by Accenture to monitor and lobby on similar issues in the proposal."

Lacy goes on to note how successful some of these mega-corporations have been when it comes to dodging taxes — and not only in the United States.

"A Reuters report last year found that from 2018 to 2019, Shell reported $2.7 billion through offshore tax havens and avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes," Lacy writes. "In 2019, Australia charged Shell $755 million for six years' worth of taxes the company did not pay. The company reported that after getting tax refunds related to the closure of oil platforms, it paid no corporate income tax in the U.K. in 2018 on $731 million in profits."

Lacy points to Walgreens as another company that knows how to dodge taxes.

"Between 2008 and 2014," Lacy explains, "Walmart held more than $23.3 billion in offshore accounts and avoided paying more than $4.59 billion in U.S. taxes, according to a 2016 Oxfam report. In an arrangement internally known as Project Flex, the company routed money through an allegedly fictitious Chinese subsidiary, Quartz reported, which allowed it to avoid paying $2.6 billion in U.S. taxes between 2014 and 2017. The 2016 report from the U.S. PIRG, CTJ, and ITEP also found that Walmart reported zero tax haven subsidiaries despite having as many as 75."

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/america-s-ultra-wealthy-is-responsible-for-28-of-unpaid-taxes-in-us-report/

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megachurches can be megarich — and the government still gives them a huge break

The Conversation

by Ryan Cragun, University of Tampa

The hashtag #TaxTheChurches began trending on Twitter in mid-July...

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f/u 821 21 families got huge breaks form trump tax bill?

post pro pub expose? momentum bill

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/congress/

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https://www.propublica.org/series/the-secret-irs-files

https://www.propublica.org/article/lord-of-the-roths-how-tech-mogul-peter-thiel-turned-a-retirement-account-for-the-middle-class-into-a-5-billion-dollar-tax-free-piggy-bank

quite long

no lx grads animation

billionaire Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, has publicly condemned “confiscatory taxes.” He’s been a major funder of one of the most prominent anti-tax political action committees in the country. And he’s bankrolled a group that promotes building floating nations that would impose no compulsory income taxes.

The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax]

But Thiel doesn’t need a man-made island to avoid paying taxes. He has something just as effective: a Roth individual retirement account.

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Over the last 20 years, Thiel has quietly turned his Roth IRA — a humdrum retirement vehicle intended to spur Americans to save for their golden years — into a gargantuan tax-exempt piggy bank, confidential Internal Revenue Service data shows. Using stock deals unavailable to most people, Thiel has taken a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall.

To put that into perspective, here’s how much the average Roth was worth at the end of 2018: $39,108.

And here’s how much $5 billion is: If every one of the 2.3 million people in Houston, Texas, were to deposit $2,000 into a bank today, those accounts still wouldn’t equal what Thiel has in his Roth IRA.

What’s more, as long as Thiel waits to withdraw his money until April 2027, when he is six months shy of his 60th birthday, he will never have to pay a penny of tax on those billions.

ProPublica has obtained a trove of IRS tax return data on thousands of the country’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. This data provides, for the first time, an inside look at the financial lives of the richest Americans, those whose stratospheric fortunes put them among history’s wealthiest individuals.

What this secret information reveals is that while most Americans are dutifully paying taxes — chipping in their part to fund the military, highways and safety-net programs — the country’s richest citizens are finding ways to sidestep the tax system.

One of the most surprising of these techniques involves the Roth IRA, which limits most people to contributing just $6,000 each year.

The late Sen. William Roth Jr., a Delaware Republican, pushed through a law establishing the Roth IRA in 1997 to allow “hard-working, middle-class Americans” to stow money away, tax-free, for retirement. The Clinton administration didn’t want to give a fat tax break to wealthy people who were likely to save anyway, so it blocked Americans making more than $110,000 ($160,000 for a couple) per year from using them and capped annual contributions back then at $2,000.

Yet, from the start, a small number of entrepreneurs, like Thiel, made an end run around the rules: Open a Roth with $2,000 or less. Get a sweetheart deal to buy a stake in a startup that has a good chance of one day exploding in value. Pay just fractions of a penny per share, a price low enough to buy huge numbers of shares. Watch as all the gains on that stock — no matter how giant — are shielded from taxes forever, as long as the IRA remains untouched until age 59 and a half. Then use the proceeds, still inside the Roth, to make other investments.

About a decade after the creation of the Roth, Congress made it even easier to turn the accounts into mammoth tax shelters. It allowed everyone — including the very richest Americans — to take money they’d stowed in less favorable traditional retirement accounts and, after paying a one-time tax, shift them to a Roth where their money could grow unchecked by Uncle Sam — a Bermuda-style tax haven right here in the U.S.

To identify those who have amassed fortunes in retirement accounts, ProPublica scoured the tax return data of the ultrawealthy for IRA accounts valued at more than $20 million. Reporters also examined Securities and Exchange Commission filings, court documents and other records, including a memo detailing Thiel’s wealth that was included in his 2005 application for residency in New Zealand.

Among this rarefied group, ProPublica found, the term “individual retirement account” has become a misnomer. Rather than a way to build a nest egg for old age, the accounts have morphed into supercharged investment vehicles subsidized by American taxpayers. Ted Weschler, a deputy of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, had $264.4 million in his Roth account at the end of 2018. Hedge fund manager Randall Smith, whose Alden Global Capital has gutted newspapers around the country, had $252.6 million in his.

Buffett, one of the richest men in the world and a vocal supporter of higher taxes on the rich, also is making use of a Roth. At the end of 2018, Buffett had $20.2 million in it. Former Renaissance Technologies hedge fund manager Robert Mercer had $31.5 million in his Roth, the records show.

Buffett didn’t respond to questions sent by email. Mercer couldn’t be reached for comment, and his accountants and attorneys didn’t respond to requests to accept questions on his behalf. Smith also couldn’t be reached for comment, and an employee at his hedge fund repeatedly hung up when ProPublica reporters identified themselves. Other representatives for Smith and his hedge fund didn’t respond.

In a written statement, Weschler said his retirement account relied on publicly traded investments and strategies available to all taxpayers. Nevertheless, he said he supports reforming the system....

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/jeff-bezos/

salon doj looking for leaker?! no salary/income, just mortgage/borrow against assets

A bombshell report published by ProPublica on Tuesday detailed leaked IRS filings suggesting that some of the wealthiest individuals in the U.S. pay next to nothing in federal taxes, despite reaping hundreds of millions or more in annual income. But now the report itself has become enmeshed in controversy over journalistic ethics and privacy concerns, especially the question of when it's newsworthy to reveal personal financial information of private citizens.

ProPublica's report, which relies on IRS records whose source remains unknown, provides a startling glimpse into the true extent of tax avoidance schemes among the richest one-tenth of the one percent.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, for example, paid zero federal income taxes for both 2007 and 2011. Tesla founder Elon Musk paid nothing for 2018. Investor and liberal philanthropist George Soros also paid zilch over the course of three years.

Other billionaires detailed in the report include former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who paid $70.7 million in federal income taxes in 2017, despite claiming $1.9 billion in personal income. (That represents roughly a 3.7% tax rate, when it arguably should have been around 52%.)

Billionaire investor and businessman Carl Icahn deducted large interest payments on his companies' debts, allowing him to avoid federal income tax payments in 2016 and 2017. That scheme involved taking out large bank loans to invest in the stock market, because the interest paid on those loans is tax-deductible, offsetting investment gains and other income.

Other billionaires lowered their taxable income by claiming they had incurred net losses. In 2011, for example, Bezos alleged he had lost money, although that his wealth of roughly $18 billion held steady from the previous year. He paid no federal income taxes thanks to his "investment losses," which in fact earned him a $4,000 family tax credit.

ProPublica also reports that corporate taxes do not make up for the tax losses resulting from these billionaire tax-avoidance schemes, largely because the corporate tax rate has plummeted in recent years, in the wake of tax cuts enacted by the Republican Congress in 2017 and signed by then-President Trump. Additionally, many companies — such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple — can circumvent a large proportion corporate taxes by claiming that their profits were made abroad.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/louis-dejoy-2652858940

raw dc rept

After the failed union vote at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, the critical postmortems ignored a reality that may result in another election: Amazon cheated.

And Louis DeJoy, the Trump-era holdover dismantling the U.S. Postal Service, helped.

A May 7 labor board hearing will consider a request for a new vote sought by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Its complaint details a campaign of intimidation to pressure employees to reject the union.

The Labor Board has a long history of looking the other way when given evidence of cheating by employers in union elections. But this time may be different because of who helped cheat --- from local on up to national officials.

The Jeff Bezos company installed drop boxes to collect votes on company property. Amazon placed these boxes despite being told by the National Labor Relations Board staff not to do so.

The drop boxes were placed with the connivance ofthe service led by DeJoy. Former President Donald Trump installed this high-rolling donor to worsen mail delivery during the fall presidential election Trump was hellbent to win. Less mail, less votes; less votes, less competition.

Here, we use the pejorative verb connivance because the drop box installed inside Amazon's Bessemer parking lot did not carry any postal insignia.

Amazon can leverage the Postal Service because Amazon has made itself crucial to USPS finances.

The Postal Service generated nearly $4 billion in revenue from Amazon in 2019 and counted an eye-popping $1.6 billion of that in profit. The volume of business Amazon delivered grew bigly last year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

This reliance on Amazon for highly profitable business likely explains why, beyond his well-documented anti-union animus, DeJoy would help Amazon fight the union.

The struggle between American workers and the bosses has been, and continues to be, fantastically lopsided.

A pro-union worker, Jennifer Bates, told reporters last month that colleagues at the Bessemer Fulfillment Center were reluctant to deposit ballots in the mysterious drop box that suddenly appeared in the parking lot.

Workers Feared Amazon

"Some of the people are afraid to put them in there," Bates said. "The 'yes' voters feel that Amazon will probably try to steal their ballots."

Labor lawyer Brandon Magner tweeted: "If Amazon did install these mailboxes, or if they exercise control over the mailboxes, such as having a key to the ballot box, that would clearly merit setting aside the election if the union were to lose."

During the voting, which lasted from Feb. 8 to March 29, Amazon demonstrated just how crucial controlling the Bessemer warehouse parking lot — and what went on inside it — was to the company.

'Coercion and Intimidation'

The union made the following claims:

Amazon hired police officers to patrol the parking lot and surveil interactions between employees and union organizers. The constant presence, according to the union's protest filing, "created an atmosphere of coercion and intimidation thereby interfering with the right of employees to a free and fair election."
The company used local government officials to change policies governing employees exiting the workplace.Amazon got the timing on a traffic light located outside the facility changed so union organizers wouldn't have much time to approach departing workers.
Workers were forced to sit through hours of mandatory indoctrination meetings. These sessions, often used by companies to scare workers into believing their jobs will disappear if they vote for a union, are often effective with workers who have not yet experienced the benefits of collective bargaining.

Without a union, individual workers have no power. And while some who voted against the union told journalists after the vote that Amazon paid them well, the issue is whether it should pay them even better along with improving their benefits and work rules.

Record Profits

Last year, Amazon reported a profit of $24.2 billion before taxes, up from $13.9 billion in 2019 and almost 10 times its 2016 pretax profit.

Amazon pays little in federal income tax. In 2020 its "effective federal income tax rate of just 9.4%, less than half the statutory corporate tax of 21%." So said Mathew Gardner of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy earlier this year when Amazon announced its latest financial success.

Amazon has been so successful that a dollar invested when it first sold stock in 1997 has now grown to $2,300, making it one of the most fantastically profitable investments even in this era of high profits in high tech.

While the company doesn't want to share more of its gains with the blue-collar Americans whose labor makes its profits possible by quickly fulfilling orders, it does lavish money on its executives. One reason to favor the top is that the way Amazon pays executives provides a stealth financial and tax subsidy.

Costly Stock Options

The company showered so many valuable stock options on its highest-paid people that the tax savings alone came to more than $600 million last year, Gardner calculated.

Stock options save companies on corporate income tax. The companies get to deduct their value even though the cost is borne by existing stockholders. The stockholders' share of the company is diluted by the new shares given to executives. In other words, it's a tax deduction that costs the company nothing.

Options are also a form of compensation that cost the company nothing, unlike the hard cash it must pay out to rank-and-file workers like those at the Bessemer warehouse.

What's most troubling about this union election is that a federal government corporation worked with management against the workers. That's a troubling sign of authoritarianism.

Remember Amazon worked inconcert with the service to install the dropbox to collect ballots on company property. The service acted after staff at the Labor Board, the federal agency tasked with protecting the rights of American workers in the private sector, told them they couldn't do it. But just as it pressured workers, Amazon pressured the service into pleasing Bezos, the richest person in America.

No Answers

Dave Partenheimer, a postal public relations manager, would not talk about who ultimately gave the go-ahead to install the dropbox in the Amazon warehouse parking lot.

Partenheimer declined to say whether the service knew that the Labor board already denied Amazon's request for such a dropbox. He also declined to identify who ultimately approved installation.

Instead, Partenheimer reiterated an earlier statement about a "Centralized Box Unit [CBU] with a collection compartment" being "suggested by the postal service as a solution to provide an efficient and secure delivery and collection point."

The Labor board isn't talking about the dropbox either, at least not while it considers the 23 separate objections filed by the Retail Store, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

The Labor board spokeswoman, Kayla Blado, declined to comment on whether the Postal Service has the authority to supersede her agency's decisions. She would not even confirm that the agency did, in fact, deny Amazon's request to have a ballot drop box installed on its property.

DeJoy Strikes Again

The persistent controversy about the dropbox and the Bessemer vote overall, however, parallels the madness that surrounded mail-in ballots during the last presidential election. DeJoy ordered the removal of mail sorting machines in the run-up to the vote, while the rest of the Trump administration whined about the supposed inability of the Postal Service to properly deliver ballots.

Trump also complained throughout his four years in office that the Postal Service was subsidizing Amazon. This was to advance his attacks on the aggressive reporting by The Washington Post, which Bezos owns, but whose newsroom he has never influenced according to the top editor and reporters working there.

We now know that the prices Amazon paid generated outsize profits for the Postal Service, exposing yet another Trump lie though only a few Americans, like DCReport readers, know this.

Fought Mail-in Votes, Then Didn't

At first, Amazon fought hard to block mail-in voting. It dismissed the potential dangers of in-person voting during the pandemic. Then it reversed course and challenging the ability of the Postal Service to deliver mail-in ballots in a timely fashion. Taken together it was a classic case of Amazon talking out of both sides of the company's mouth.

Lisa Y. Henderson, the Labor board's acting Region 10 director, dismissed the company's contradictory arguments in January and ordered that balloting be conducted by mail.

How the Labor board rules, and whether the long list of federal rules that hobble union organizing, will be addressed by President Joe Biden's administration. Decisions will be crucial to whether Americans as a whole prosper, or we continue to create inequality through policies that tilt heavily to the side of business owners and investors.

The struggle between American workers and the bosses has been, and continues to be, fantastically lopsided.

The Economic Policy Institute's Unequal Power Project, for instance, notes an "inherent imbalance in bargaining power between employers and employees" that creates "a lack of freedom in the workplace."

Pro-union workers at Amazon's Bessemer Fulfillment Center remained undaunted after losing the initial vote, declaring, "This battle has just begun."

"I'm not discouraged, Linda Burns told reporters after losing the vote by a more than 2-to-1 margin. "This is the beginning. [Jeff] Bezos, you misled a lot of our people. We're going to fight for our rights."

Co-worker Emitt Ashford said if the Labor board does order a new election, "We would see a change in the tide now that people have the information."

"We would win," he said.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/sinclair-broadcast-group/sinclair-pushes-unlikely-claims-bidens-proposed-corporate-tax-increases

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/big-pharma/

'Outrageous': Big Pharma using loophole to get taxpayers to fund billions in fines for fueling opioid crisis

Four pharmaceutical corporations that agreed to pay a combined $26 billion to settle lawsuits resulting from a deadly opioid crisis they helped create reportedly plan to recoup a portion of those costs by deducting roughly $4.6 billion of the payouts from their taxes—sparking intense condemnation.

Big Pharma is attempting to make the public cover some of the fines related to lawsuits filed by dozens of state and local governments highlighting the culpability of opioid manufacturers and distributors in the deaths of an estimated 70,000 people per year.

As Public Citizen president Robert Weissman put it in a statement released Friday, "The drug companies are settling with taxpayers (local government entities) and then demanding that taxpayers pay part of the cost (via a federal tax subsidy)."....

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/republican-party-funding/

it's time to defund the GOP, and there's precedent and strategy for the effort.

The need to cut the party's access to both private and government money is seen in the reaction by some extremist Republicans to news like a New York State lawmaker's proposal to make vaccination against COVID-19 mandatory. Predictably, the far right is freaking out. "Freedom!" they scream as they run around maskless, assaulting their fellow citizens with potentially virus-laden breath.

Large parts of the Republican base now join conspiracists in the misguided belief that vaccine manufacturers are participating in mind-control experimentsand that public health measures like masks are "un-American," while we're being sickened and dying from the highest rates of COVID-19 infection and death in the developed world.

Republicans on the Supreme Court even say the founders of our republic and the framers of the Constitution would never go along with preventing churches and synagogues from holding superspreader events during a pandemic, but, like so many things GOP, it's a lie.

In 1798, President John Adams signed the first public health care legislation—it was to pay for medical care and hospitalization not just for the Navy but also for civilian sailors. And both he and President George Washington had participated in quarantine events during epidemics in the summers of 1793 and 1798, and both promoted inoculation against smallpox.

From 1790 to 1800, Philadelphia was the nation's capital. When the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 recurred in 1798, that city's board of health, with no objections raised by President John Adams or any member of Congress, ordered a block-by-block evacuation of parts of Philadelphia.

Most signers of the Declaration and Constitution were still alive, and many were in Congress and on the Supreme Court. None opposed the lockdown. Churches not only couldn't meet; a few in the quarantine areas were closed down entirely for much of the year in America's capital city.

From their bans on teaching sex education and evolution in our schools, to denying climate change, to this latest campaign against public health, far-right Republicans' fight against science has damaged America's standing in the world and destroyed the lives of millions.

Thomas Paine, in his time, wrote about "The Age of Reason." Today we have "The Age of Intentional Republican Stupidity." And they don't just embrace it for themselves; they're hell-bent on imposing it on every American, from schoolchildren on up.

They have rigged elections by making it hard to vote, seditiously tried to overturn the 2020 election, promoted racial and religious bigotry and violence, destroyed our public school systems, gutted our unions, and rewritten our tax system to screw the middle class.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have damaged America more in 40 years than our worst enemies could have dreamed of by other means.

These Republicans are not patriots; they're traitors to reason, science, education, human rights, democracy and now, unbelievably, public health. They're traitors to humanity itself.

The only way to deal with a death-dealing cult is to end it; thus, we must embark on a campaign to defund the Republican Party.

Back in 1981, the Republican Party decided to defund the Democratic Party, and actually pulled it off.

While the Republican Party had principally been funded by rich people and big business since the 1920s, the Democrats were largely reliant on the labor unions. So Ronald Reagan, as part of his "Reagan Revolution," figured the best way to destroy the Democratic Party was to destroy America's unions.

His first shot was to destroy PATCO, the air traffic controllers' union, and he did it in less than a week in August of 1981. He, along with Republicans in Congress and conservatives on the Supreme Court, then embarked on a campaign to eliminate unions from the American landscape, thus gutting the Democratic Party's ability to win elections.

It worked, and by 1992, American union membership, and union's ability to fund elections, had collapsed so severely that Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party turned to giant corporations and billionaires to win that election year.

Reagan's plan not only kneecapped the Democratic Party for the next 40 years but also changed the party at its core, turning it from President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society party into Bill Clinton's corporate-friendly Democratic Leadership Council/New Democrats, now in bed with big banks, insurance companies, etc.

Defunding the Republican Party may even force it to start focusing on the needs of regular people rather than just billionaires and corporations, which only adds to the urgency of the job. There are just a few steps through the process, which include:

End "Red State Welfare."
Kentucky gets $2.41 for every dollar they send to Washington, D.C. Most other red states are similarly "taker" states, so let's fight for a law limiting states to no more than, say, $1.50 for every buck they sent to D.C. in tax revenues. Call it welfare reform!
End corporate welfare that gets recycled to GOP politicians. This includes $700 billion a year to fossil fuel companies, and nearly $1 trillion a year we give to Big Pharma, as well as support for insurance companies (like subsidies for the "Medicare Advantage" scam) and "Big Ag."
End corporate monopolies. Break up giant corporations and make America safe again for small businesses while rejuvenating local economies. From airlines to tech to banking and retail, giant monopolies rip off working-class Americans and use some of that money to fund the GOP.
Bring back Eisenhower's 91 percent top tax rate, or at least something north of 50 percent. America's strongest economy was during the 30 years from 1950 to 1980, with a top tax rate of 91 percent to 74 percent. Progressive taxation on the super-wealthy was openly supported by Republican presidents like Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford. With that tax revenue, we built highways, schools and hospitals, and put men on the moon, while the best way CEOs could avoid the tax was to use the money to pay their workers better wages. Reagan cut that top rate to less than 30 percent, and the billionaires it produced now pour money into the GOP to keep it that way.
Follow Europe's example and impose a wealth tax on great fortunes. Average Americans pay a wealth tax every year—the property tax on their largest store of wealth, their homes. Billionaires should pay a similar annual tax on their money bins.
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End campaign contributions from corporations, end super PACs, and limit billionaires' ability to skew our politics with their money. We did this in the 1970s after the Nixon bribery scandals, but the Supreme Court blew it up. There are multiple ways around that, and the Democratic Party should make this job one.

These simple "Progressive Contract with America" steps, along with restoring the ability of American workers to unionize, will not only revive the Democratic Party, but also restore America to economic greatness and give us a far more honest political system.

Thom Hartmann is America's number one progressive talk-show host and the New York Times bestselling author of The Hidden History of American Oligarchy and more than 30 other books in print. His online writings are compiled at HartmannReport.com. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/billionaire-tax/

$427 billion lost each year to tax dodging by corporations and the rich: landmark study

Julia Conley and Common Dreams November 23, 2020

A first-of-its-kind international report released Friday shows how wealthy countries are the primary drivers of tax revenue loss each year—contributing to $427 billion in losses to public funding annually and affecting the ability of countries all over the world, including developing nations, to provide services to the public.

The Tax Justice Network's inaugural State of Tax Justice report is the first study to thoroughly measure how much money each country loses each year to corporate tax abuse and private tax evasion, using data that was self-reported by corporations to tax authorities.

The report notes that in light of the global coronavirus pandemic, the loss of revenue to tax abuse and evasion has major implications for public health efforts. One nurse's annual salary is lost every second to tax havens—the equivalent of 34 million nurses' salaries each year.

"A global tax system that loses over $427 billion a year is not a broken system, it's a system programmed to fail," said Alex Cobham, chief executive of the Tax Justice Network.

"Under pressure from corporate giants and tax haven powers like the Netherlands and the U.K.'s network, our governments have programmed the global tax system to prioritize the desires of the wealthiest corporations and individuals over the needs of everybody else," he continued. "The pandemic has exposed the grave cost of turning tax policy into a tool for indulging tax abusers instead of for protecting people's wellbeing."

Lower-income countries are particularly affected by tax evasion during public health crises like the current pandemic, with losses are equivalent to 52% of their public health budgets. While rich countries lose hundreds of billions more dollars each year to tax evasion and abuse, their losses only make up about 8% of their public health budgets.

Latin America and Africa's tax losses are equivalent to about 20.4% and 52.5% of their public health budgets, respectively.

Contrary to data compiled in the European Union's "highly politicized blacklist" of tax havens, the Tax Justice Network said, high income countries are behind a vast majority of global tax abuse. The British territory Cayman Islands is responsible for other countries losing $70 billion in public funding each year, while the U.K.'s tax laws take away more than $42 billion. The U.S. is in fifth place globally, robbing other countries of $23.6 billion each year.

While countries including Palau and Trinidad and Tobago are on the EU's blacklist and are not cooperative with international tax regulations, the Tax Justice Network reported, they "did not create any observable tax losses for other countries."

Meanwhile, high-income countries are behind 98% of public funding losses around the world, contributing to a loss of $419 in annual tax revenues.

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Corporate abuse by multinational corporations is directly responsible for the loss of $245 billion each year, with companies shifting $1.38 trillion in profits out of the countries where those profits were earned into tax havens, the report said. Private tax evaders also stored a total of $10 trillion in offshore accounts, leading to a loss of $182 billion in public funding.

Joe Boughner, public affairs director for Canada-based labor union ACFO-ACAF, tweeted that corporations which penalize workers for "crippling our economy" by taking time off should focus far more on the $5.7 billion lost each year to tax evasion and corporate abuse.

Rosa Pavanelli, general secretary of the global labor union Public Services International, who took part in Tax Justice Network's webinar launching the report, pointed to the notion of "building back better" after crises like the pandemic, which has been adopted by the United Nations and U.S. President-elect Joe Biden.

"If you really believe in building back better then pay your taxes!" Pavanelli tweeted. "If governments don't act now our democracies are really in trouble."

To ensure countries around the world don't continue to lose hundreds of billions of dollars each year which could go to strengthening their public health, infrastructure, and education systems, the Tax Justice Network said, governments must promptly take three far-reaching actions:

Introduce an excess profit tax on multinational corporations making excess profits during the pandemic, such as global digital companies, in order to cut through profit shifting abuses.

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Introduce a wealth tax to fund the Covid-19 response and address the long term inequalities the pandemic has exacerbated, with punitive rates for opaquely owned offshore assets and a commitment between governments to eliminate this opacity.

Establish a UN tax convention to ensure a global and genuinely representative forum to set consistent, multilateral standards for corporate taxation, for the necessary tax cooperation between governments, and to deliver comprehensive, multilateral tax transparency.

The report also called on G20 member countries, which are collectively responsible for 26.7% of global tax losses and cost countries $114 billion each year through their tax laws and loopholes for the wealthy, to address the issue at their summit this weekendand require the publication of individual multinational companies' tax reporting, "so that corporate tax abusers and the jurisdictions that facilitate them can be identified and held to account."

"Now more than ever we must reprogram our global tax system to prioritize people's health and livelihoods over the desires of those bent on not paying tax," Cobham said.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/montana-sen-steve-daines-backed-policies-that-benefited-him-and-gop-pal-rep-greg-gianforte/

igor salon

senSteve Daines of Montana, one of the richest members of the U.S. Senate, has repeatedly backed policies that benefited both him and his longtime business partner Rep. Greg Gianforte, who is Montana's lone congressman and the richest member of the House of Representatives. The two Republicans are both involved in tight political campaigns this year: Daines is running for re-election against Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, a Democrat and former presidential candidate, in a race that could well decide control of the Senate. Gianforte is running for governor against Democratic Lt. Gov. Mike Cooney.

Daines and Gianforte have done business together for decades and co-own a real estate company that appears to have benefited from the 2017 Republican tax bill, which they both supported. Daines made his vote for the bill contingent on increasing a tax deduction for "pass-through" entities, which allow business income to be treated as personal income, a deduction that appears to have saved him thousands in taxes. Daines has also sponsored several more obscure bills that benefited Gianforte, who has an estimated net worth of $189 million.

Daines and Gianforte own 75% of Genesis Partners, a commercial real estate firm, with Daines holding about 25%, according to the Helena Independent Record. Daines and Gianforte were listed as "active" managers on the company's 2019 annual financial report filed with the Montana Secretary of State's office. Daines valued his assets in Genesis between $4 million and $17 million and reported between $430,006 and $4.1 million in rent or royalties and capital gains income from the firm in 2019, according to his most recent personal financial disclosure.

Both Daines and Gianforte voted to back the 2017 Republican tax bill, which was a**"boon to commercial real estate owners.**" The bill doubled the depreciation deductions for commercial real estate investors for heating, ventilation, air conditioning and fire protection systems. After the tax law went into effect in 2018, Genesis Partners received a building permit valued at $300,000 that included work on the HVAC and fire suppression systems at its property at 110 Enterprise Boulevard in Bozeman, Montana, its first such permit since 2004. The company later sold the property in December 2019, according to Daines' financial disclosure, after its value jumped from $1.75 million in 2018 to $2.08 million in 2019, according to the Montana Department of Revenue.

Genesis also received a building permit valued at $80,000 that included work on the fire sprinkler at a nearby property at 136 Enterprise Boulevard that same year, its first such permit since 2009. The value of the property increased from $4.94 million in 2018 to $6.44 million in 2019, according to the Montana Department of Revenue, while the Republican tax law allowed for additional savings on the company's tax bill.

Daines had threatened to oppose the tax bill because it did not "cut taxes deeply enough" for pass-through entities, Politico reported ahead of the vote. The GOP secured Daines' vote by expanding the increasing the deduction for pass-through entity owners from 17% to 20%. The deduction would have shaved about $37,946 from Daines' taxable income in 2017, according to an analysis by the Billings Gazette.

Daines has also supported legislation that benefited Gianforte, who has been his close friend since the late 1990s. Daines worked at the Bozeman tech firm RightNow Technologies before Gianforte sold the company to Oracle for $1.8 billion, as Salon's Roger Sollenberger has previously reported. Both lawmakers have backed policies that Oracle lobbied for since coming to Congress. Daines left the firm before the sale but retained his stock, which resulted in a big windfall. He is now one of the richest members of Congress, with an estimated net worth of $6.9 million.

Daines' and Gianforte's campaigns did not respond to questions from Salon.

In 2017, Daines sponsored a bill that could benefit the Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO), the credit monitoring agency. Gianforte is a member of FICO's board of directors and owns nearly $7 million in the company's stock.

The Support for Rapid Innovation Act was intended to encourage the Department of Homeland Security to support private sector cybersecurity research. Daines did not refer to FICO by name but touted the company's technology during a hearing on the bill and called for similar technology to be adopted by DHS for cybersecurity purposes.

That same year, Daines co-sponsored the Modernizing Government Technology Act, which was passed as an amendment to a defense funding bill. The bill established "IT working capital funds at 24 federal government agencies and allow[ed] them to use savings obtained through streamlining IT systems, replacing legacy products and transitioning to cloud computing for up to three years for further modernization efforts."

That bill created a new pool of federal money to dole out to big tech firms, and was a big boost to multiple companies in which Gianforte owns stock. Red Hat and ServiceNow — Gianforte's biggest tech holdings — along with Cisco and IBM all lobbied for the bill.

Red Hat also lobbied for "procurement reform" in 2017 and later lobbied on issues related to the implementation of the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Act (FITARA). In 2017, Daines sponsored Senate version of the FITARA Enhancement Act, which expanded the original law.

Gianforte reported that his stock in Red Hat was worth about $1.8 million in 2016. A year after Daines' bills passed, that value increased to $3.64 million. His stock in ServiceNow was worth $782,280 in 2016 but increased to $1.6 million by 2018.

Gianforte also reported owning $2.4 million in stock in financial institutions in 2018. Daines sponsored numerous bills aimed at deregulating the financial sector. He sponsored the CLEAR Relief Act of 2017, "which provides a [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau] qualified mortgage safe harbor for small financial institutions with $10 billion or less." Numerous banking groups lobbied for the bill, portions of which were later passed as part of a larger legislative package.

Daines also sponsored the TAILOR ACT of 2017, "which requires financial regulators to tailor their rules to consider the size, risk profile, complexity, and business model of financial institutions impacted." That bill was approved by the Republican-led House but stalled in the Senate.

Daines was also behind the Home Mortgage Disclosure Adjustment Act of 2017, "which exempts small community banks and credit unions that issue less than 500 mortgages annually from onerous demographic reporting requirements." Portions of that bill were later rolled into a separate legislative package.

Daines also pushed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Accountability Act of 2017, which aimed to "address regulations passed under Dodd-Frank and make the bureau accountable to the American people by bringing it under the Congressional appropriations process." The bill never came to a vote.

Daines was also a key player in the Trump administration's rollback of the Dodd-Frank regulations passed after the Great Recession, and was singled out by President Donald Trump at the bill's signing ceremony even though he was not a co-sponsor of the bill or a member of the Senate Banking Committee.

The two lawmakers have also enjoyed an unusually close relationship in Washington. Gianforte and his wife Susan were two of Daines' earliest financial backers when the latter announced his first run for Congress in 2010. They also made maximum donations to Daines' campaign when he ran for U.S. Senate in 2014 and again the following year after he was elected. Gianforte even hosted a fundraiser for Daines that was headlined by former House Speaker John Boehner, the National Journal reported, noting that Gianforte could "benefit from Washington connections through his friendship with Sen. Steve Daines."

Daines, likewise, endorsed Gianforte in his failed 2016 gubernatorial bid and campaigned for him in 2017 when Gianforte won his congressional seat in a special election, despite body slamming a reporter during the campaign.

The two lawmakers also launched a joint Gianforte Daines Victory Committee in 2018.

Since Gianforte's election to the House, Daines has flown on Gianforte's private plane at least nine times, according to his 2017 and 2018 personal financial disclosures. Daines reported that he reimbursed Gianforte for all the flights, often paying more than $2,000 for air travel that would have cost a fraction of that price on commercial airlines.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/real-tax-reform-never-had-a-chance-under-trump-and-this-gop/

In the wake of the New York Times' revelation that Donald Trump paid no federal income taxes in 10 of the previous 15 years, some of his staunch supporters are saying, "Well, wasn't he just doing what our tax laws allow?"

We may never entirely know whether he followed or broke the law because Republicans in Congress have so thoroughly gutted the IRS that the agency seems incapable of catching up with wealthy investors like Trump.

Congress is certainly to blame both for providing a ridiculously lenient tax code for the super-wealthy and for preventing the IRS from enforcing even the existing weak limits in the law on tax avoidance.

One person is primarily responsible for the farce that is Donald Trump's tax dodging, and that is Donald Trump.

But make no mistake, one person is primarily responsible for the farce that is Donald Trump's tax dodging, and that is Donald Trump. For years, he has actively and loudly supported special tax breaks and tax shelters, making him anything but a passive bystander to their creation.

Many tax experts look to the Tax Reform Act of 1986 as a model of loophole-closing, simplifying tax reform (even if it failed to raise needed revenue). But in 1991, Donald Trump testified before a congressional committee that "this tax act was just an absolute catastrophe for the country and for the real estate industry." He called it "the 1986 catastrophe of the Tax Reform Act."

Trump criticized the very notion of simplifying the tax code by eliminating special breaks. "They thought the word tax shelter was a bad thing," he complained of congressional tax writers, "as opposed to saying it's an investment in real estate."

In 1993, Trump and the real estate industry convinced Congress to revive some of those breaks.

So, it is no surprise that when Trump became president and led the first major rewrite of the tax code in decades, the result was the opposite of a simplified tax system free of special breaks and loopholes.

(With one exception—see a related blog post on the one thing in the 2017 tax law that could have limited Trump's tax dodging and how Congress has already reversed it.)

Here are some types of special breaks available to real estate investors, which we explained in an ITEP report that the 2017 tax law did not touch.

First, real estate investors can use losses more easily than other taxpayers to reduce their tax bills.

Trump regularly reports losses that likely exceed any investment of his own money into business ventures. Investors in other types of business are subject to stricter rules barring them from claiming losses that exceed what they really invested—what they have "at risk." But real estate is subject to looser rules to determine what constitutes "at risk" or a "passive loss."

Second, real estate investors can defer reporting capital gains and other income more easily than other taxpayers can.

Usually whenever an investor sells an asset at a profit, it is a capital gain subject to income tax. But real estate investors who can afford sophisticated tax planning can arrange to trade an appreciated property for another property and avoid reporting income to the IRS because, technically, no sale occurred. The Times reported two years ago that Jared Kushner's family uses this tactic and the Trump Organization likely does as well.

These "like-kind" exchanges are just one of the methods that are available to major real estate investors to defer reporting profits. The 2017 tax law eliminated like-kind exchanges—except for real estate.

Third, real estate investors can more easily avoid reporting debt forgiveness as income.

In general, forgiveness of debt is considered income that is subject to income tax. Without such a rule, the income tax would be very easy to avoid. For example, workers could ask their employers to change their compensation to loans that are later forgiven, so that their compensation would not be subject to income tax.

But major real estate investors can achieve this result because the rules for debt forgiveness are less strict for them. The new Times revelations about Trump touch upon this, explaining that the "I.R.S. considers forgiven debt to be income, but Mr. Trump was able to avoid taxes on much of that money by reducing his ability to declare future business losses."

Fourth, real estate investors benefit from depreciation deductions when the value of their property is climbing.

Owners of assets can claim deductions for depreciation, which is supposed to reflect the fact that assets wear out and lose their value over time. Investors in real estate can depreciate buildings they own even though they sometimes then sell them at a profit, reflecting the fact that their value increased rather than fell.

The benefit of this would be limited to a degree if the rules ensured that profits reflecting amounts already depreciated were taxed at "ordinary" income tax rates rather than a special, low capital gains tax rate, as is the case today.

The Times report does point out that many of Trump's properties would be running at a loss even aside from depreciation deductions. On top of all the tax breaks for wealthy real estate investors, Trump is also just a terrible businessperson who does generate real losses on most ventures he is involved in.

But he also benefits from a tax code that has allowed him to live like a billionaire without paying any taxes in most years and he actively worked, both before and during his presidency, to ensure that the tax code continues to allow this. In hindsight, it obvious the real tax reform never had a chance under this president.

The Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy is a non-profit, non-partisan tax policy organization that conducts rigorous analyses of tax and economic proposals and provides data-driven recommendations on how to shape equitable and sustainable tax systems. Steve Wamhoff is ITEP's director of federal tax policy.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/real-tax-reform-never-had-a-chance-under-trump-and-this-gop/

One person is primarily responsible for the farce that is Donald Trump's tax dodging, and that is Donald Trump.

In 1993, Trump and the real estate industry convinced Congress to revive some of those breaks.

(With one exception—see a related blog post on the one thing in the 2017 tax law that could have limited Trump's tax dodging and how Congress has already reversed it.)

Here are some types of special breaks available to real estate investors, which we explained in an ITEP report that the 2017 tax law did not touch.

First, real estate investors can use losses more easily than other taxpayers to reduce their tax bills.

Second, real estate investors can defer reporting capital gains and other income more easily than other taxpayers can.

Third, real estate investors can more easily avoid reporting debt forgiveness as income.

Fourth, real estate investors benefit from depreciation deductions when the value of their property is climbing.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/radical-republicans-ramrodded-a-law-through-congress-and-you-guessed-it-the-rich-made-out-like-bandits/

the first data showing how all Americans are faring under Donald Trump reveals the poor and working classes sinking slightly, the middle-class treading water, the upper-middle-class growing, and the richest among us luxuriating in rising rivers of greenbacks.

More than half of Americans had to make ends meet in 2018 on less money than in 2016, my analysis of new income and tax data shows.

The nearly 87 million taxpayers making less than $50,000 had to get by in 2018 on $307 less per household than in 2016, the year before Trump took office, my analysis shows.

That 57% of American households were better off under Obama contradicts Trump’s often-repeated claim that he had created the best economy ever until the pandemic.

trump policies help the prosperous and rich including half a million rich people who are not even filing tax returns yet are not being pursued as tax cheats.

The worsened economic situation for more than half of Americans contradicts Trump’s frequent claims that he is the champion of the “forgotten man” and his vow that “every decision” on taxes “will be made to benefit American workers and American families.”

These figures come from my annual analysis of IRS data known as Table 1.4. The income figures are pre-tax money that must be reported on tax returns. I adjusted the 2016 data to reflect inflation of 4.1% between 2016 and 2018 (slightly more than 2% a year).

This is the first data on the first full year when Trump was president. It also is the first year that the Radical Republican tax system overhaul, passed in December 2017, took effect. The Trump tax law, the most significant tax policy change since 1986, was passed without a single public hearing or a single Democratic vote.

High Income Households Multiply

Trump policies overwhelmingly favor the top 7% of Americans, my analysis shows. And, oh, do they benefit!

Trump policies help the prosperous and rich, the data reveal, including half a million rich people who are not even filing tax returns yet are not being pursued as tax cheats, a separate report shows.

The number of households enjoying incomes of $200,000 or more soared by more than 20%. The number of taxpayers making $10 million or more soared 37% to a record 22,112 households.

Who Saves on Taxes

The Trump/Republican tax savings were highly concentrated up the income ladder with hardly any tax savings going to the working poor and only a smidgen to the middle class.

Those making $50,000 to $100,000 for example, paid just three-fourths of one percentage point less of their incomes to our federal government. People making $2 million to $2.5 million saw their effective tax rate fall by about three times that much.

Now let’s compare two groups, those making $50,000 to $100,000 and those declaring $500,000 to $1 million. The second group averaged nine times as much income as the first group in 2018.

Under the Trump tax law, the first group’s annual income taxes declined on average by $143, while the second group’s tax reduction averaged $17,800.

Put another way, a group that made nine times as much money enjoyed about 125 times as much in income tax savings, thanks to Trump and Congressional Republicans.

This disparity helps explain Trump’s support among money-conscious high-income Americans. But given the tiny tax benefits for the vast majority of Americans, along with cuts in government services, its surprising that he enjoys significant support among people making less than $200,000—except that none of the biggest news organizations do the kind of analysis you are reading, at least not since I left The New York Times a dozen years ago. Instead, the major news organizations quote Trump’s claims and others’ challenges without citing details.

Understating Incomes

The figures I cite here understate actual incomes at the top for two reasons. One is that loopholes and Congressional favors allow many rich and superrich Americans to report much less income than they actually enjoy. Often they get to defer for years or decades reporting income earned today.

Second, with Trump’s support Congress has cut IRS staffing so deeply that it cannot even pursue growing armies of rich people who have stopped filing tax returns. The sharp decline in IRS auditing means tax cheating—always a low-risk crime—has become much less risky.

Trump Ignores Rich Tax Cheats

In the three years ending in 2016, the IRS identified 879,415 high-income Americans who did not even bother to file a tax return. These tax cheats owed an estimated $45.7 billion in taxes, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reported May 29.

Under Trump more than half a million cases of high-income Americans who didn’t file a tax return “will likely not be pursued,” the Inspector General wrote.

One of the Koch brothers was under IRS criminal investigation until Trump assumed office and the service abruptly dropped the case. DCReport’s five-part series last year showed, from a thousand pages of documents, that William Ingraham Koch, who lives one door away from Mar-a-Lago, is collecting more than $100 million a year without paying income taxes.

Borrowing to Help the Rich

Trump’s tax law will require at least $1.5 trillion in added federal debt because it falls far short of paying for itself through increased economic growth even without the pandemic. Most of the tax savings were showered on rich Americans and the corporations they control. Most of the negative effects will fall on the middle class and poor Americans in the form of Trump’s efforts to reduce government services.

The 2017 income tax law caused only a slight decline in the share of adjusted gross income that Americans paid to Uncle Sam, known as the effective tax rate. Adjusted gross income is the last line on the front page of your tax return and is in the measure used in my analysis.

The overall effective tax rate slipped from 14.7% under Obama to 14.2% under Trump.

Curious Anomaly

In what might seem at first blush a curious development, Americans making more than $10 million received a below-average cut in their effective tax rate. The effective tax rate for these 22,000 households declined by less than half of a percent.

The reason for that smaller-than-average decline is that these super-rich Americans depend less on paychecks and much more on capital gains and dividends that have long been taxed at lower rates than paycheck earnings.

My analysis of the new tax data also shows a sharp shift away from income from work and toward income from investments, a trend which bodes poorly for working people but very nicely for those who control businesses, invest in stocks, and have other sources of income from capital.

Overall the share of American income from wages and salaries fell significantly, from almost 71% in 2016 to less than 68% in 2018.

Meanwhile, if you look just at the slice of the American income pie derived from business ownership and investments, it expanded by nearly one-tenth in two years. Income from such investments is highly concentrated among the richest Americans.

Infuriating Fact

There’s one more enlightening and perhaps infuriating detail I sussed from the IRS data.

The number of households making $1 million or more but paying no income taxes soared 41% under the new Trump tax law. Under Obama, there were just 394 such households. With Trump, this grew to 556 households making on average $3.5 million without contributing one cent to our government.

Again, Trump seems to have forgotten all about the Forgotten Man. But he’s busy doing all he can to help the rich, then stick you with their tax bills.

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aha:? family fdn tax shelter, ~ estate tax, arts philanthropy also tax dodge but also rehabiliatation PR (// "job-creators"?)

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/ralph-nader-ranks-the-infinite-greed-power-and-controls-of-giant-corporations

Ralph Nader ranks the infinite greed, power and controls of giant corporations

The combination of greed and power often spin out of control and challenge the enforceable rule of law and the countervailing force of the organized civic community.

When greed and power are exercised by giant multinational corporations that escape the discipline of the nation-state, the potential for evil becomes infinite in nature. Enough is never enough.

Global giant companies, aided and abetted by their corporate attorneys and accountants, can literally decide how little taxes they are going to pay by shifting profits and expenses among different tax haven countries such as Ireland, Luxembourg, and Panama.

These same companies then proceed to lobby any nation, including most prominently the United States. Congress and the White House are pushed to cut formal tax rates, pack the tax laws with loopholes, and lower further the effective tax rate. The formal top tax rate for billions of company profits is now 21%, while the actual tax rate is lower – much lower for banks, insurance companies, drug companies, and behemoth tech companies like Apple that master tax avoidance.

"Generous” is not a word one can associate either with Apple or it’s avaricious, CEO Tim Cook. One of the first moves Tim Cook made, after replacing legendary Apple Founder, the cancer-stricken innovator Steve Jobs, was to arrange a $378 million, 2011 compensation package for himself and launch the biggest stock buyback in corporate history. Apple, which is worth $1.5 trillion has spent $327 billion since 2013 to buy back 2.5 billion shares of stock. Yet Apple has done little to produce productive investments, remediation of used and very toxic Apple products when discarded, or increase pay for the 350,000 serf-labor workers in China toiling under its merciless contractor Foxconn.

Apple made $104 billion in the last 12 months, puffed up by tax-avoidance, tax cuts and a no tariff deal with Trump on its Chinese imports, yet Tim Cook has rejected pleas to spend a little over $2 billion (deductible) to award a full year’s pay bonus to the 350,000 Foxconn workers who build Apple’s iPhones and iPads.

Apple’s massive stock buybacks have, however, increased the metrics to set compensation levels for Tim Cook and his executive sidekicks. Unfortunately, stock buybacks do little to tamp down excessive prices for Apple products. The massive stock buybacks also send a message that Apple’s management has no other uses for its corporate cash – not for R&D, not for improving the nature and security of its workers’ pensions, not for investing in curtailing the damaging side effects of Apple products on the environment and not for reducing other offloaded damage to society.

Tim Cook and Apple are also stingy, given their vast wealth, with charitable contributions. So stingy that Apple’s bosses do not even come close with the company’s charitable deduction limit of five percent of adjusted gross income. In 2018 Apple gave $125 million to charities. Apple’s net income for 2018 was $59.53 billion – a tiny fraction of one percent!

Recently, the New York Times published articles showing how tiny the executive pay cuts were by the very few executives who announced and declared sympathy for their laid-off and impoverished workers.The media has also been reporting illicit maneuvers developed by corporate attorneys to help chain stores get relief payments that should have gone to legitimate small businesses. (Why isn’t the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) speaking out against this abuse and avarice?)

Replacing some of their greed with generosity could be directed to the estimated $6 billion to $11 billion needed this coming school year to give low-income students full equipment and connectivity to the internet for remote learning during the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions. States and localities need $4 billion to assure the voting process will be fair and that all votes be counted and on time. The Republicans in the Senate are blocking the money needed to guarantee free and fair elections. Four billion dollars for the profit-glutted Silicon Valley giants Facebook, Google, Apple plus Amazon, and Microsoft, is peanuts. These high-tech digital giants could easily contribute the money needed to avert a widely predicted election time disaster and weeks of understaffed counting after November 3^rd. Imagine such a show of patriotism from these companies.

Then there are the matters of woefully inadequate supplies, facilities, and training programs to counter the spreading Covid-19 pandemic that is crumbling the economy. These record-setting profitable companies, with soaring stock prices due to their monopolistic powers or consumer-gouging, should return some of Trump’s giveaway tax cuts of 2017 and the burgeoning corporate welfare payments from crony-capitalistic Washington, D.C. to help their afflicted or vulnerable fellow Americans. Many of these people are their own workers, friends, and relatives.

Economists should develop a “Hedonistic Index,” to rank the “greed-with-power” status of the 500 largest U.S. corporations.

People have the right to know how CEOs and major corporations do on the “Hedonistic Index” of greed and power. After all, at the end of the day, we are all paying the price of the full measure of the infinite avarice spiraling from these corporate supremacists and their private governments of control.

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covid

4 trillion? mnu

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/economist-paul-krugman-mitch-mcconnell-is-trying-to-create-a-corporate-slush-fund-and-democrats-should-just-say-no/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/i-made-a-lot-of-bankers-look-very-good-trump-lets-the-mask-slip-as-wall-street-titans-get-32-billion-tax-windfall/

no lnx

‘I made a lot of bankers look very good’: Trump lets the mask slip as Wall Street titans get $32 billion tax windfall

Written by Jon Queally / Common Dreams January 17, 2020

“I made a lot of bankers look very good,” President Donald Trump boasted this week just before it was reported Thursday that the nation’s six largest banks alone have received an estimated $32 billion windfall thanks to Republican tax cuts.

The figures were generated by Bloomberg News after reviewing the 2019 profits earnings of JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley.

By looking at the banks’ earnings in relation to effective tax rates that dropped from 20% to 18% last year—and comparing that to the 30% average they paid prior to the tax cut bill passed by Republicans and signed by Trump at the end of 2017—the analysis showed just how well the Wall Street giants have fared even as they cut back their work forces approximately 1,200 people over the same time period.

“The tax savings have spurred the banks to record profit,” Bloomberg‘s Yalman Onaran reported. “The six firms posted $120 billion in net income for 2019, inching past 2018’s mark. They had never surpassed $100 billion before the tax cuts.”

Joe Weisenthal

@TheStalwart

EXCLUSIVE calculation from Bloomberg...

Trump's tax cuts have allowed the 6 biggest banks in America to save $32 billion. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-16/trump-tax-cut-hands-32-billion-windfall-to-america-s-top-banks?srnd=premium … via @Yalman_Onaran

Morris Pearl, chair of Patriotic Millionaires, which advocates for higher taxes on the wealthy and large corporations, said the latest figures only further prove what critics of the Republican tax giveaway knew and predicted since it was first proposed—that it was a gift to big banks and a scam perpetrated against Trump by regular people.

“The Trump administration touted that the average American was going to get $4,000 from their signature tax legislation,” Pearl told Common Dreams. “If you average six bank executives getting $32 billion while millions of people get $0, maybe that does average to $4000 per person. It’s still reprehensible and fiscally irresponsible that just six banks got a $32 billion windfall while ordinary Americans are struggling.”

On social media, his group broke the numbers down by bank:

Patriotic Millionaires

@PatrioticMills

Big banks savings from #GOPTaxScam

JPMorgan

2018: $3.7 billion

2019: $5 billion

Bank of America

2018: $3.4 bn

2019: $4 bn

Wells Fargo

2018: $3 bn

2019: $3.3 bn

Citi

2018: $1.7 bn

2019: $2.8 bn

Morgan Stanley

2018: $1 bn

2019: $1.4 bn

Goldman Sachs

2018: $1.2 bn

2019: $1 bn

“It looks like Trump just let the six largest banks ‘get away with murder’ something he promised he wouldn’t do as president,” said Warren Gunnels, senior advisor to Bernie Sanders, in response to the reporting. “We need to break up these big banks and tax Wall Street to cancel all student debt.”

Warren Gunnels@GunnelsWarren

It looks like Trump just let the 6 largest banks "get away with murder" something he promised he wouldn't do as president.

We need to break up these big banks & tax Wall Street to cancel all student debt.

That's exactly what #PresidentSanders will do. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-16/trump-tax-cut-hands-32-billion-windfall-to-america-s-top-banks …

Trump Tax Cut Hands $32 Billion Windfall to America’s Top Banks

Savings for the top six U.S. banks from President Donald Trump’s signature tax overhaul accelerated last year, now topping $32 billion as the lenders curbed new borrowing, pared jobs and ramped up...

bloomberg.com

Trump’s comments about his role in the bankers’ bonanza were made Wednesday when he gathered with top financial executives at the White House to celebrate a trade deal with China.

“They just announced earnings and they were incredible,” Trump said to Mary Erdoes, who heads asset and wealth management for nation’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase. As American Banker reports, Trump then asked Erdoes “for reciprocation” in the form of a thank you from the bank.

“They were very substantial,” Trump said to Erdoes of the tax savings and profits. “Will you say, ‘Thank you, Mr. President,’ at least, huh?”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/giant-megabanks-have-saved-billions-of-dollars-thanks-to-gop-tax-cuts-but-have-been-cutting-not-adding-jobs-report/

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Giant megabanks have saved billions of dollars thanks to GOP tax cuts — but have been cutting, not adding, jobs: report

Written by Alex Henderson January 17, 2020

In late 2008 — when George W. Bush was in the final months of his presidency and the Great Recession was accelerating — the term “too big to fail” was used to describe megabanks that were pleading for bailout money. But many of the megabanks that feared for their survival during the 2008 crash not only survived; they grew even larger. And journalist Dino Rabouin, in an article published by Axios on January 17, reports that for two years in a row, megabanks have been saving billions of dollars thanks to the GOP’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.

Drawing on data from Bloomberg News, Rabouin notes that the GOP tax law “helped power the biggest U.S. banks to record profits for the second straight year.” Yet “struggling workers,” according to Rabouin, are not the main beneficiaries.

“The tax cut was sold as a way to revitalize hiring and spending by American companies to boost the economy and help struggling workers,” Rabouin observes, “but the windfall is largely staying with banks and their shareholders…. Rather than use the money to hire a bonanza of workers or invest in big new capital projects or equipment, the banks used it largely to buy back stock and pad their balance sheets.”

Rabouin notes that “JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley announced earnings this week showing they saved $18 billion in 2019, and their average effective tax rate fell to 18% from 20%. Banks had previously paid effective tax rates of around 30%, Bloomberg found.”

But despite all the money they saved in taxes, megabanks haven’t been increasing the size of their workforce. Rabouin writes, “The big banks have actually shed jobs since passage of the tax cut law, collectively reducing their workforce by 1200 people since 2017, Bloomberg reported.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-naked-lie-that-republicans-are-the-party-of-fiscally-responsibility-has-been-completely-demolished/

no lnx graf

The naked lie that Republicans are the party of ‘fiscally responsibility’ has been completely demolished

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly December 27, 2019

One of the ways that Republicans demonstrate that they are the “post-truth” party is that, when Democrats are in office, they prioritize federal deficit reduction, but when they’re in charge, the deficit soars. Right on cue, the Wall Street Journal reported back in October that the federal deficit was about to reach $1 trillion.

A strong economy typically leads to narrower deficits, as rising household income and corporate profits help boost tax collections, while spending on safety-net programs such as unemployment insurance tends to decline.

The U.S. economy has been growing for 10 years as of July, the longest economic expansion on record. Yet annual U.S. deficits are on track to exceed $1 trillion starting this year, due in part to the 2017 tax law, which constrained federal revenue collection last year, and a 2018 budget deal that busted spending caps enacted in 2011.

When even Rupert Murdoch’s paper credits the Republican tax cuts as a contributor, you can take that one to the bank. Steve Benen put together a helpful chart to demonstrate what has happened to the deficit over time.

[graf]

The blue bars during the Obama years were a result of the Great Recession when federal revenues plummeted, the demand for safety net programs like unemployment insurance rose, and one-time stimulus spending was required to kick-start the economy. But as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, we are now in the midst of the longest economic expansion on record, which means that the deficit should be shrinking. Instead, it is ballooning. In a world where truth mattered, that would mean the end of the Republican line about how tax cuts pay for themselves.

When Republicans were negotiating among themselves over their tax cut plan in 2017, they made it clear that their main goal was to reduce corporate tax rates. At the time, they complained that, at 39 percent, corporate tax rates in the U.S. were among the highest in the world. What they didn’t want you to know is that the effective corporate tax rate (what was actually paid after all of the loopholes were incorporated) was around around 29 percent, right in the middle of the pack for industrialized countries.

After a full year of implementation, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy documented the effects of the Republican tax cuts, which lowered the corporate tax rate to 21 percent. Here are theirkey findings.

* The 379 profitable corporations identified in this study paid an effective federal income tax rate of 11.3 percent on their 2018 income, slightly more than half the statutory 21 percent tax.

* 91 corporations did not pay federal income taxes on their 2018 U.S. income. These corporations include Amazon, Chevron, Halliburton and IBM…

* Another 56 companies paid effective tax rates between 0 percent and 5 percent on their 2018 income. Their average effective tax rate was 2.2 percent.

The richest corporations are now paying an effective tax rate of 11.3 percent, while most of the huge monopolies are paying nothing at all. Rather than trickling down, those reductions are causing the federal deficit to soar.

Meanwhile, Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell went on a spending spree—literally bragging about his efforts to buy off Kentucky voters with what Mitt Romney once referred to as “free stuff” (emphasis mine).

Senate Majority LeaderMitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is delivering more than $1 billion worth of federal spending and tax breaks to his Kentucky constituents, just in time for Christmas and ahead of a potentially tough reelection campaign…

McConnell’s wins in the spending legislation included coal miners’ pension benefits; $410 million for the construction of the new Robley Rex Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Louisville; $314 million for cleanup of Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a $40 million increase over last year’s funding level; a tax break for spirits distillers worth an estimated $426 million in 2020 alone; and $65 million for the construction of the Forage Animal Production Lab at the University of Kentucky.

“I was directly responsible — directly responsible — for these items,” McConnell declared at the press conference.

He also secured a tax break for Kentucky’s thoroughbred horse racing industry, $16.5 million for the Department of Agriculture to implement the pro-hemp provisions McConnell got into the 2018 farm bill and $61.3 million for new military construction projects at Fort Campbell.

We can have reasoned debates about federal deficits, taxes, and spending programs. But the naked lies from Republicans demonstrate that their approach has nothing to do with what is best for the American people. They have made it abundantly clear that their priorities are all about more money for the wealthy elite and an obvious power grab for those in office. It is beyond time to bust the myth that the GOP is the party of fiscal responsibility. They are nothing if not reckless and irresponsible.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/new-analysis-of-trump-and-republican-tax-breaks-shows-tons-of-massive-corporations-pay-nothing-in-taxes/

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New analysis of Trump and Republican tax breaks shows tons of massive corporations pay nothing in taxes

Written by Walter Einenkel / Daily Kos December 26, 2019

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP.ORG) has done an analysis of 379 corporations and their tax burdens since the Republican Party and Donald Trump gave them the enormous tax cuts that most Americans were dead-set against.

“Corporate Tax Avoidance In The First Year of The Trump Tax Law” is available here for viewing or downloading.The findings are what we have come to expect: Big companies got big returns from the tax cuts, and on top of that, most corporations still couldn’t resist exploiting loopholes allowing them to pay even less than the meager amount set out by the Republican Party.

The 379 profitable corporations identified in this study paid an effective federal income tax rate of 11.3 percent on their 2018 income, slightly more than half the statutory 21 percent tax

91 corporations did not pay federal income taxes on their 2018 U.S. income. These corporations include Amazon, Chevron, Halliburton and IBM. An ITEP study released in April 2019 examined 2018 Fortune 500 filings released to date and found 60 companies paid zero in federal income taxes. Now, all companies have released their 2018 financial filings, and this report reflects that.

Another 56 companies paid effective tax rates between 0 percent and 5 percent on their 2018 income. Their average effective tax rate was 2 percent.

They are supposed to pay out 21 percent, but by hiding money offshore and by tucking it into CEO “stock options” allowing them to claim lower total profits, most too-big-to-fail businesses continue to pay half of what is already not a fair share of anything. The review found that even the 57 companies that paid slightly higher rates than the statutory 21 percent were frequently paying out previously deferred tax debt. That already owed the government and were catching up on that money while not actually paying what, by law, they should be paying now.

Of the 91 corporations not paying anything in federal income taxes, here are the top 10 most profitable:

Amazon.com

Delta Air Lines

Starbucks

Chevron

General Motors

EOG Resources

Occidental Petroleum

Duke Energy

Dominion Resources

Honeywell International

In all 10 of those examples, their effective tax rates are negative. Poor, poor corporations. No wonder they keep cutting jobs while recording record profits and C-suite executive salaries. How’d you like that deal?

In total, the 379 corporations enjoyed $73.9 billion dollars in corporate welfare. Of course, like all acute inequalities, only a handful of the biggest companies received the lions share of that sweet public money. ITEP says that 25 of the largest corporations made up half—$37.1 billion—of those pocketed tax dollars.

Going through the years in “effective tax rates,” from President Ronald Reagan until now, ITEP says that “the 11.3 percent effective tax rate found in this study is likely the lowest effective tax rate in the last 40 years, well below the 14.1 percent effective tax rate that shocked President Reagan into supporting loophole closing reforms.” Keep in mind, even Reagan Republicans needed to do something about how egregious their low effective tax rate was in 1986, for optics’ sake. The current crew couldn’t care less, because they are all in on undemocratic rule of law.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/huge-corporations-paid-just-11-3-percent-tax-rate-thanks-to-trump-and-the-republicans-what-did-you-pay/

no lnx

Huge corporations paid just 11.3 percent tax rate thanks to Trump and the Republicans. What did you pay?

Written by Laura Clawson / Daily Kos December 17, 2019

The Trump-Republican tax law is having the intended effect—if you understand that enriching massively wealthy corporations was always the intended effect. Hundreds of profitable corporations paid an average corporate income tax of 11.3%, just over half of the greatly reduced corporate tax rate—and many paid zero, or got money back from the government.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) looked at Fortune 500 companies, identifying 379 of them “that were profitable in 2018 and that provided enough information to calculate effective federal income tax rates, which is the share of 2018 pretax profits they paid in federal income taxes in that year.” Those 379 big companies had an overall 11.3% average tax rate, but 91 paid nothing, and 56 paid less than 5%. We’ve heard a lot about how Amazon paid nothing—and in fact got a rebate—on $10.8 billion in profits, but it’s not the only one. Halliburton, Chevron, and IBM also paid no corporate income tax.

”Video game maker Activision Blizzard had $447 million in profits but received a tax rebate of $243 million, resulting in an effective tax rate of -54.4 percent,” The Washington Post reports. “The company went on to shed 800 jobs in the early weeks of 2019.”

ITEP notes that, in lowering the corporate tax rate, lawmakers could have also eliminated loopholes to ensure that companies did pay the reduced rate. But “Instead, the new law introduced many new breaks and loopholes, though it eliminated some old ones.” That’s how you lower the rate from 35% to 21% and end up with top corporations paying just 11.3% on average—the lowest rate ITEP has found since it started keeping track of this in 1984. This has a massive effect on the U.S. budget, with corporate taxes as a share of federal revenue plunging to just 1%.

This is the world the Republicans want. Democrats are running to make these enormously profitable companies pay their fair share.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/the-plutocrats-most-effective-secret-weapon-is-the-u-s-tax-code/

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The plutocrats’ most effective secret weapon is the U.S. tax code

Written by Jim Hightower / Creators Syndicate November 12, 2019

I should start this homily on inequality by distinguishing income from wealth. Income is your annual wages or salary, as well as your earnings from a business, pension or government benefits such as Social Security, etc.

As the average U.S. worker’s real wages have stagnated for more than a decade, income disparity has become enormous. The bottom 90% of us average $30,000 a year, while the top 0.01% and 0.001% (about 1,400 taxpayers) rake in average annual incomes of $35.1 million and $152 million, respectively.

Meanwhile, even mediocre CEOs pocket many millions a year, and the greediest Wall Street hucksters annually amass more than $1 billion in booty. Until relatively recently, the ethical standard was for workers to gain a proportionate share of the income growth we generate. But in the last dozen years, the rich have been gobbling more and more of the total income pie, so the bottom half of Americans now get only 14%.

As gross as income inequality is, though, it’s dwarfed by the lesser-known wealth disparity that has engulfed our land, mocking our egalitarian pretensions.

Wealth is your net worth, the total financial value of every asset you own: your home(s), business, stocks, cash, real estate, cars, yachts, jewels, gold, art, toys and … well, everything, minus debts.

Startling statistic: 1 in 5 Americans have zero net worth — or less. Many of us owe more than we own and, living paycheck to paycheck, can’t get ahead to build a nest egg.

More startling statistic: U.S. wealth disparity is the greatest of any advanced economy in the world, with the richest 1% holding more of our nation’s wealth than the bottom 90% of us.

Even more startling: Just three Americans — Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway) — possess more personal wealth ($248 billion) than the entire bottom half. Yes, more than 165 million of us combined.

The rapidly widening divide between the rich and the rest of us is neither natural nor accidental. During the past half-century, myriad corporate and governmental decisions — from labor law to campaign finance regulations — have methodically slanted America’s economic and political systems so that money and power flow from the many to the few. The plutocrats’ most effective and least reported-on tool is America’s tax structure.

For most of us — workers, professionals, farmers, small-business folks, etc. — income taxes are generally straightforward. The rich are different. Multimillionaires and billionaires don’t usually draw the bulk of their fabulous incomes from paychecks but from their enormous financial assets, i.e., their wealth. This inherited or accumulated wealth generates “capital income” — and further wealth — with little or no work by the asset holder.

As the Center for American Progress’ excellent report “Ending Special Tax Treatment for the Very Wealthy” details, the moral basis of U.S. tax policy has been perverted since the 1980s by legislative and regulatory twists that tax work but let these massive accretions of wealth skate by virtually untouched. Thus, the ultrarich, who benefit the most from our country’s economy and public infrastructure, pay the smallest proportion of their incomes to sustain it.

Today’s tax laws offer a carnival of loop-the-loops, whirligigs and other tax-free joyrides for those who’ve stockpiled capital income. For example, while you might pay the top tax rate of 37% on ordinary income, someone selling a capital asset like stock pays only 20% tax on income from that sale.

Nearly 70% of such capital gains are made by America’s richest 1%,who reap trillions of dollars a year in savings through such special tax treatments. This windfall allows them to amass and concentrate even more of America’s wealth in their sheltered accounts and buy the political clout to push through laws that the great majority oppose — such as 2017’s Trump-McConnell trillion-dollar tax giveaway to the rich. (Facing overwhelming public opposition, the GOP wrote the bill behind closed doors, allowed no public hearings and rammed it into law on a partisan vote.)

And round and round it goes … unless and until we stop it.

Read the Center for American Progress’ report.

Center for American Progress’ report.

Populist author, public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes “The Hightower Lowdown,” a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org. COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/another-betrayal-trump-promised-to-bring-offshore-profits-home-but-hes-doing-the-opposite/

an 1019

'Another betrayal’: Trump promised to bring offshore profits home — but he’s doing the opposite

Igor Derysh / Salon

The Trump administration is considering a rule change that would make it easier for American companies to stash money offshore to avoid U.S. taxes, despite the president’s repeated campaign promises…

no lnx

‘Another betrayal’: Trump promised to bring offshore profits home — but he’s doing the opposite

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon October 11, 2019

The Treasury Department is looking to weaken or eliminate Obama-era regulations aimed at preventing companies from moving their income to their overseas branches to lower their U.S. tax bill, Bloomberg reports. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive, instead wants to replace the existing rules with “something more business friendly.”

The move would be a boon to large corporations, who already saw their taxes permanently slashed by the Republicans’ 2017 tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefited companies at the expense of individual taxpayers.

Prior to the 2016 rule, companies were able to move money to their offshore branches that they could then lend to their American branches, while deducting the interest from the tax bill. The Obama-era rule allowed the IRS to consider these inter-company loans as equity, which eliminated a key incentive for companies to move profits overseas.

Democrats slammed the administration for trying to weaken rules that allow tax avoidance when it should be creating tougher ones.

“One of the Trump administration’s top priorities has been making it as easy as possible for the wealthiest Americans and corporations to cheat and avoid taxes,” Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement. “Rules preventing the offshoring of corporate profits should be strengthened — not weakened.”

Critics of the rule say it is no longer necessary because the tax cuts made these inter-company loans less attractive, according to Bloomberg.

Mark Mazur, Obama’s former assistant secretary for tax policy at Treasury when the rule was created, disputed that claim.

“On the face, they do slightly different things and so it’s hard to believe that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act took care of every one of those dimensions,“ he told Bloomberg.

On its face, Republican criticism of the rule simply doesn’t align with reality.Trump had earlier claimed that the 2017 tax cuts would bring back $4 trillion in offshore profits that had been stashed overseas. Through the end of 2018, his claim fell about $3.3 trillion short, Bloomberg reported earlier this year.

The tax law slashed the rate on repatriated profits from 35 percent to a onetime 15.5 percent tax rate on cash and an 8 percent tax on non-cash assets. Trump claimed that the change would bring back $4 trillion in offshore profits, even though banks estimated that only about $1.5 trillion to $2.5 trillion was held offshore by U.S. companies. Corporations brought back less than $670 billion from the time the tax law was enacted until the end of 2018.

Researchers also rejected Trump’s claim that the repatriated profits would boost investment in the U.S.

“Policy changes have a relatively small impact on hiring and investment decisions if firms have relatively easy access to credit markets,” said a 2018 report from researchers at the University of Richmond and Claremont McKenna College.

Instead, companies have been using their tax savings for stock buybacks, in which companies buy back their own stock to return more money to shareholders.

A report from Citigroup found that companies in the S&P 500 spent more than $800 billion on stock buybacks in 2018, far more than the total amount spent on investing in new equipment or the total amount of repatriated cash.

Last year, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, introduced a bill that would close loopholes in the tax law to equalize tax rates on domestic and foreign profits.

“President Trump promised the American people he’d end the march of jobs and profits overseas,” Whitehouse said in a statement at the time. “Instead, he’s doled out massive new tax breaks that reward offshoring.”

Democrats again called out Trump for trying to help major corporations rather than workers.

“Another betrayal by President Trump — choosing corporations over American workers,” wrote Sen.Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio. “Shameful.”

comm dr 919

William Minter

Corporations Getting to Zero With GOP's Inside Help on Tax Avoidance...

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/how-multinational-corporations-pad-their-budgets-with-the-wealth-of-developing-countries/

Amazon.com Inc. was brought to court by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in 2017 for transfer pricing discrepancies. In 2005 and 2006, the multinational techcompany transferred $255 million in royalty payments to its tax haven in Luxembourg, but according to the IRS these royalty payments should have amounted to $3.5 billion. This transfer pricing adjustment would have increased Amazon’s federal tax payments by more than $1 billion.Even for the U.S., a country with decent (although waning) infrastructure, the loss of this much cash in federal tax revenue is substantial. Take for instance the water crisis in Flint, Michigan—if the city’s estimated costs of $55 million to replace the pipes are accurate, then Amazon’s tax payments could have saved the 100,000 residents from lead poisoning 18 times over.

Water supply is not the only infrastructural problem that arises when export countries suffer from a dramatic loss of tax revenue. Education, hospitals, telecommunications, and roads also decline. And in developing countries—the countries that endure the most severe backlashes of transfer and trade mispricing—this infrastructure is often never properly constructed in the first place. The much-needed cash is, instead, sitting in a tax haven.

The anonymous whistleblower who, in 2015, leaked the 11.5 million documents that we now know as the “Panama Papers” shared in a manifesto that “income inequality” was their motivation in revealing the levels of financial abuse that tax havens create.A key concern for the whistleblower is that tax havens are “metastasizing” across the earth’s surface—214,000 offshore entities are cited in the Panama Papers. The “metastasizing” certainly continued after the release of the Panama Papers—just two years later, a U.S. PIRG study found that 73 percent of the Fortune 500 companies operated 9,755 tax haven subsidiaries....as being “the core of a global system that allows large corporations and wealthy individuals to avoid paying their fair share, depriving governments, rich and poor, of the resources they need to provide vital public services and tackle rising inequality.”

Tax havens are a geopolitical nightmare, and transfer pricing is a legal accounting trick to get money into tax havens.

Transfer Mispricing, Defined

There’s a wide range of these kinds of tax avoidance games played by multinationals: Transfer mispricing, abusive transfer pricing, trade misinvoicing, base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS), and re-invoicing—they all fall under the umbrella of trade mispricing, or the intentional falsification of transactions on an international level, and are the process that has allowed the old colonial relations of productions to continue. Arguably, the polynymity of this deceptive practice is evidence of its ubiquity, but “thievery” could just as well replace any of these titles.

The short-term goals for mis- or re-invoicing vary. In some cases the desired outcome is to dodge capital controls (a strategy commonly used in emerging markets to reduce rapid cash outflows). In other cases, the incentive for misinvoicing is to claim tax incentives or avoid paying duty. Generally, the scheme is this: shift profits out of high tax countries and into low tax countries, or tax havens, while ensuring that the majority of the expenses are assigned to high tax countries.

In 2015, Global Financial Integrity (GFI) published a study revealing that in 2013 an astounding US$1.1 trillion was stolen annually—or nearly $3 billion a day—from developing countries due to trade mispricing. If you wonder why developing countries seem rather slow to develop, here’s a big part of the answer. The head-spinning loss of $3 billion a day in taxable revenue begs the question: is “corporate practice” simply legal thievery?... the pricing of commodities traded between or within multinational enterprises—is a legal practice and a key feature of cross-border and intra-firm transactions. The United Nations prefers to use the broader phrase “trade pricing” in addressing this practice and defines it as a “normal incident of the operations of multinational enterprises (MNEs).” Because the word “incident” evokes concern, it should not go unnoticed. One of the most disruptive consequences of transfer pricing is that international transactions are now governed by the common interests of the “associated enterprises” of an MNE group. That is, market forces no longer control the transactions because with the allowance of transfer pricing, an increasing percentage of global trade (this includes the international transfer of goods and services, capital, and intangible goods, or intellectual property) now occurs as an internal practice between affiliated entities.

Theoretically, internal transfer pricing is supposed to follow the arm’s length principle. This principle follows the idea that transfer prices should be controlled and recorded as if internal trades were happening amongst independent entities, or at “arm’s length.” But like the IRS case against Amazon.com reveals, proving arm’s length is not so straightforward. So while the “arm’s length principle” is very much written into place (Brazil is listed as the only country without domestic legislation or regulation that makes reference to the arm’s length principle), even research from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations recognize that this principle is very much impossible to implement.

Unable to ignore the ease with which a company could engage in abusive transfer pricing, the OECD and the G20 countries first drafted the “BEPS Action Plan” in 2013 as part of a broader effort to enhance transparency for tax administrations to assess transfer pricing. At large, base erosion and profit shifting undermine the integrity of any tax system. But the direct “harm” BEPS created for individual taxpayers and governments was only part of the motivation for implementing the 2013 action plan. The other motivating factor was the added risk to businesses, including the risk to an MNE’s reputation in the event its effective tax rate was viewed as being “too low” as it would impede, locally, “fair competition” for corporations functioning only in those domestic markets. With this latter motivation, little promise ought to be expected from the plan as it maintains a focus on risks brought to MNEs.

Setting potential reputation risks aside, the incentive for companies to strategically misprice trade or shift their profits is to avoid tax or duty payments. The incentive is to shield wealth. And while there is no single way to avoid tax payments and dues, there is one necessary component: tax haven subsidiaries. ...Tax haven subsidiaries function as cash canals to transport taxable profits with the goal of lowering or, if you are Amazon Inc., entirely avoiding tax payments. But a company’s subsidiary in a tax haven requires financial sleights of hand to get the cash safe. Take for instance the Goldcrest method Amazon used in Luxembourg. It shifted its intellectual property rights (or intangibles) that were held by its U.S. parent company to its subsidiary, Amazon Lux. The subsidiary then collected royalties tax-free on international sales. Google and Ikea, similarly, decided to play the “Going Dutch” move, using their subsidiaries in the Netherlands.

The “Swiss Sidestep” is another tax play, and rather than royalty payments, “management service fees” are the key element. By paying a value-added service fee to a sister company in a European tax haven, a company can “side-step” tax payments by converting profits into fees. And, then, of course, there is the privacy and protection that a company gets on the island of Mauritius—with the “Mauritius Maneuver” a person can send their cash to Mauritius to avoid income tax and then bring it back—without a trace—as “foreign investment.” ...Each of these fictional narratives that frame the legal movement of cash across borders has one theme in common: wealth protection and, therefore, poverty production.

The Colonial Undertones of Transfer Pricing

It is not the case that some industries are more prone than others to transfer mispricing, or even that developed countries are immune to this manipulative business practice—the IRS case against Amazon is a great example of this. But, it is the case that developing countries are more vulnerable to the impact of transfer mispricing. Suppose a company extracts 2 megatons (MT) of cobalt from Papua New Guinea (PNG) and then exports the 2 MT (or 1 million kilograms) at the price of US$5 per kilogram, but imports into Canada—by way of Mauritius or the Netherlands—the same 2 MT of cobalt at the price of US$10. The result for PNG is the loss of tax revenue on $5 million. Even at a mere 5 percent tax rate with these modest and imaginative figures, a loss of US$250,000 for PNG is significant.

The impact of trade and transfer mispricing on developing countries is not just monetary. There is a series of moral effects as well. In the hypothetical PNG scenario, for instance, one glaring concern that arises from this manipulative business practice is the implication that the people of PNG are somehow unaware of the value of their own resources. Trade mispricing, then, alienates people from their own place, and in a manner similar to a worker’s alienation from their product. A red flag must be raised to the psychological impact of pricing discrepancies that suggest cobalt, somehow, has a lesser value within the borders of PNG than within, say, Canada or Belgium.

The combination, or the intersection, of these two matters—these monetary and moral effects—is evidence that trade and transfer (mis)pricing, the crux of an MNE—are symptoms of an ongoing colonial hangover. The antidote? Establish strict and enforceable regulations so that one nation’s economic sovereignty does not come at the expense of another nation’s resource sovereignty.

Tanya Rawal-Jindia is a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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no lnx

These billionaires are begging for the US government to raise their taxes

written by Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams June 24, 2019

In an open letter to 2020 presidential candidates of all parties Monday, a group of billionaires active in progressive organizations called for implementing a wealth tax on the richest Americans and outlined the wide range of political, social, and economic benefits of doing so.

Published by the New York Times, the letter (pdf) reads in part:

We are writing to call on all candidates for president, whether they are Republicans or Democrats, support a moderate wealth tax on the fortunes of the richest 1/10 of the richest 1 percent of Americans—on us. The next dollar of new tax revenue should come from the most financially fortunate, not from middle-income and lower-income Americans.

America has a moral, ethical, and economic responsibility to tax our wealth more. A wealth tax could help address the climate crisis, improve the economy, improve health outcomes, fairly create opportunity, and strengthen our democratic freedoms. Instituting a wealth tax is in the interest of our republic.

It goes on to highlight polling which shows broad support for a wealth tax, the “vital needs” that revenue generated could help fulfill, and that some of the more than two dozen candidates for the White House already have expressed support for such a measure.

A proposal from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), for example, “would provide millions of families with a better shot at the American dream by taxing only 75,000 of the wealthiest families in the country” by imposing “a tax of 2 cents on the dollar on assets after a $50 million exemption and an additional tax of 1 cent on the dollar on assets over $1 billion.”

Seth Hanlon

NEW LETTER TO PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES:

61% of Americans support a wealth tax.

So do some very prominent people who would pay it.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/business/economy/wealth-tax-letter.html …

“Those of us who have signed this letter believe it is our duty to step up and support a wealth tax that taxes us,” the letter reads. “It is a key to both addressing our climate crisis, and a more competitive, stronger economy that would better serve millions of Americans. It would make America healthier. It is a fair way of creating opportunity. And it strengthens American freedom and democracy. It is not in our interest to advocate for this tax, if our interests are quite narrowly understood. But the wealth tax is in our interest as Americans.”

The letter is signed by 18 named individuals from 11 incredibly wealthy families, including Robert S. Bowditch Jr., founder of real estate development firm MB Associates, and his wife, Louise Bowditch; filmmaker Abigail Disney; philanthropist George Soros and his son Alexander Soros; Arnold S. Hiatt, chairman of the Stride Rite Charitable Foundation; Regan Pritzker, president of the Libra Foundation; and Liesel Pritzker Simmons and Ian Simmons, co-founders of the impact investment organization Blue Haven Initiative.

“We thought it would be a good idea,” Ian Simmons explained to the Times. “Liesel and I decided to reach out to some other folks to see if they thought it was a good idea, too.”

Ian Simmons

@isimmons

We hope all 2020 candidates of all parties consider, support & improve the hugely popular #wealthtax idea as they develop their platforms. As they do it may also make sense to understand why we who would pay more under the tax are actually in favor of it. https://nyti.ms/2Rzx0zx

3:32 AM - Jun 24, 2019

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The financier George Soros is part of a group of wealthy individuals calling for “a moderate wealth tax on the fortunes of the richest one-tenth of the richest 1 percent of Americans — on us.”

A Message From the Billionaire’s Club: Tax Us

A group of wealthy Americans, some with inheritances and some with self-made fortunes, are calling for a tax on the net worth of people like them.

nytimes.com

42 people are talking about this

Others signatories to the letter are entrepreneur Nick Hanauer; Justin Rosenstein, co-founder of the company Asana; Stephen M. Silberstein, co-founder of the software company Innovative Interfaces; Molly Munger and her husband Stephen English, co-founders of the civil rights group Advancement Project; philanthropist Agnes Gund and her daughter Catherine Gund; and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and his husband, Sean Eldridge, founder of the progressive group Stand Up America.

Hughes told the Times that “one thing that we collectively want to see is further research and more activism on policy design.”

The letter came as Americans for Tax Fairness Action Fund on Monday launched a website detailing the tax proposals of each Democratic presidential candidate.

“It’s surprising that this early in the 2020 race tax policy is emerging as a key issue and a defining one for Democrats,” the group’s executive director, Frank Clemente, said in a statement. “The utter failure of the Trump-GOP tax cuts to live up to the promises of more jobs and higher wages has given the candidates an opening to propose major tax increases as part of their campaign platforms. Virtually all candidates are saying they want to repeal or significantly roll back the Trump-GOP tax cuts.”

The impacts of the Trump-GOP tax cuts, public support for higher taxes on rich individuals and companies, and voter demand for higher investment in public services, Clemente added, “have combined to create an environment in which candidates—far from having to shy away from the tax issue as in past years—will actually be rewarded for proposing major tax increases on the wealthy and corporations, and using the money to pay for vital public investments.”

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TAX DODGE 3 policy

TV news barely covered Trump's Big Oil “quid pro quo” last year. Now that it's come to fruition, networks should give the scandal the attention it deserves.

...Syndicated conservation easements

GOP proposes repealing Biden’s student debt relief to fund new tax cuts for the rich

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