TAX DODGE2 bak

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">see TAX DODGE 3</span> policy 916</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> =</font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/billionaire-tax/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/billionaire-tax/</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><b>$427 billion lost each year to tax dodging by corporations and the rich: landmark study</b></div><div>
</div><div>Julia Conley and Common Dreams November 23, 2020</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">   </span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.</span></div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div><div><b>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.</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">"A global tax system that loses over $427 billion a year is not a broken system, it's a system programmed to fail</span>," said Alex Cobham, chief executive of the Tax Justice Network.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">"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."</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>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.</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Latin America and Africa's tax losses are equivalent to about 20.4% and 52.5% of their public health budgets, respectively.</span></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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. <b>The British territory Cayman Islands</b> 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<b>. The U.S. is in fifth place globally, robbing other countries of $23.6 billion each year.</b></span></div><div>
</div><div>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."</div><div>
</div><div>Meanwhile, high-income countries are behind 98% of public funding losses around the world, contributing to a loss of $419 in annual tax revenues.</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Corporate abuse by multinational corporations is directly responsible for the loss of $245 billion each year,</b> 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.</span></div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
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</div><div>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.</div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>"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."</b></div><div>
</div><div>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<b>, governments must promptly take three far-reaching actions:</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><b>Introduce a wealth tax to fund the Covid-19 response and address the long term inequalities the pandemic has exacerbated,</b> with punitive rates for opaquely owned offshore assets and a commitment between governments to eliminate this opacity.</div><div>
</div><div>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.</div><div>
</div><div><b>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 weekend </b>and 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."</div><div>
</div><div>"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.</div><div>
</div><div>FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><div>'The billionaire election': How 2020 is a referendum on wealth ... ›</div><div>Billionaire wealth has surged by nearly $1 trillion during 7 months of ... ›</div><div>Billionaire wealth rises to more than $10 trillion for first time ever ... ›</div><div>RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><div>How does US tax law allow billionaires not to pay? Read this and try ... ›</div><div>Tech billionaire charged in 'largest ever' tax fraud for hiding $2 ... ›</div><div>What could the US afford if it raised billionaires' taxes? We do the math ›</div></div><div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></p></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><p><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" text-align="text-align" justify="justify" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Caterpillar, for example, saved $2.4 billion between 2000 and 2012 by funneling its global parts business through a Swiss subsidiary (a ruse so audacious that one of its tax consultants </span><a href="denied:%20%20%20http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/business/at-hearing-caterpillar-defends-tax-practices.html?r=0" style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" font-style="font-style" inherit="inherit" font-weight="font-weight" text-align="text-align" justify="justify" margin="margin" px="px" padding="padding" border="border" outline="outline" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" text-decoration-line="text-decoration-line" none="none">warned</a><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" text-align="text-align" justify="justify" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"> Caterpillar executives to “get ready to do some dancing” when called before Congress to justify it).  </span></p><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/radical-republicans-ramrodded-a-law-through-congress-and-you-guessed-it-the-rich-made-out-like-bandits/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/radical-republicans-ramrodded-a-law-through-congress-and-you-guessed-it-the-rich-made-out-like-bandits/</a></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="background-color: rgb(245, 245, 245); font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"><b>      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.</b></span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The worsened economic situation for more than half of Americans contradicts Trump’s frequent <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/the-inaugural-address/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">claims that he is the champion of the “forgotten man”</a> and his vow that “every decision” on taxes “will be made to benefit American workers and American families.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These figures come from my annual analysis of <a href="https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-statistical-tables-by-size-of-adjusted-gross-income" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">IRS data known as Table 1.4</a>. The income figures are pre-tax money that must be reported on tax returns.  I adjusted the 2016 data to reflect <a href="https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">inflation of 4.1%</a> between 2016 and 2018 (slightly more than 2% a year).</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></p><h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">High Income Households Multiply</font></h3><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Trump policies overwhelmingly favor the top 7% of Americans, my analysis shows. And, oh, do they benefit!</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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 <a href="https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2020reports/202030015fr.pdf" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">separate report shows</a>.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></p><h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Who Saves on Taxes</font></h3><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">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.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></p><h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Understating Incomes</font></h3><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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 <a href="https://trac.syr.edu/tracirs/latest/549/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">sharp decline in IRS auditing</a> means tax cheating—always a low-risk crime—has become much less risky.</font></p><h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump Ignores Rich Tax Cheats</font></h3><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">In the three years ending in 2016, the IRS identified</font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> 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,</font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"> the <a href="https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2020reports/202030015fr.pdf" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration reported May 29</a>.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">One of the Koch brothers was under IRS criminal investigation until Trump assumed office and the service abruptly dropped the case. <a href="https://www.dcreport.org/tag/koch-papers/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">DCReport’s five-part series</a> 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.</font></p><h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Borrowing to Help the Rich</font></h3><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>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.</b> 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.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The overall effective tax rate slipped from 14.7% under Obama to 14.2% under Trump.</b></font></p><h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Curious Anomaly</font></h3><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Overall the share of American income from wages and salaries fell significantly, from almost 71% in 2016 to less than 68% in 2018.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></p><h3 style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.3em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Infuriating Fact</font></h3><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There’s one more enlightening and perhaps infuriating detail I sussed from the IRS data.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">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.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">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.</font></p></div><div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"> </font></p></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">mofo mnuchin tax dodge </font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-trump-quietly-handed-billions-more-in-tax-breaks-to-huge-corporations-report/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-trump-quietly-handed-billions-more-in-tax-breaks-to-huge-corporations-report/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">n o lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>How Trump quietly handed billions more in tax breaks to huge corporations: report</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams December 30, 2019</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">215</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>A “disturbing” New York Times story published Monday detailed how President Donald Trump’s Treasury Department, led by former Goldman Sachs banker Steve Mnuchin, has quietly weakened elements of the 2017 tax law in recent months to make it even friendlier to wealthy individuals and massive corporations.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Lobbyists representing some of the largest corporations in the world, the Times reported, targeted two provisions in the original 2017 law designed to bring in hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue from companies that had been dodging U.S. taxes by</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);"> stashing profits overseas.</span></b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“The corporate lobbying campaign was a resounding success,” the Times noted. “Through a series of obscure regulations, the Treasury carved out exceptions to the law that mean many leading American and foreign companies will owe little or nothing in new taxes on offshore profits… Companies were effectively let off the hook for tens if not hundreds of billions of taxes that they would have been required to pay.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The two provisions are known by the acronyms BEAT (base erosion and anti-abuse tax) and GILTI (global intangible low-taxed income). Shortly after Trump signed the $1.5 trillion tax bill—which slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%—lobbyists from major American companies like Bank of America and General Electric as well as foreign banks swarmed the White House in an effort to gut the BEAT and GILTI taxes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Trump’s Treasury Department largely granted the lobbyists’ wishes, turning what was already a massive corporate handout into an even more generous gift to big companies and banks.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Times reported:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The Organization for International Investment—a <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">powerful trade group</span> for foreign multinationals like the Swiss food company Nestlé and the Dutch chemical maker LyondellBasell—objected to a Treasury proposal that would have prevented companies from using a complex currency-accounting maneuver to avoid the BEAT</b>… This month, the Treasury issued the final version of some of the BEAT regulations. The Organization for International Investment got what it wanted.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The lobbying surrounding the GILTI was equally intense—and, once again, <b>large companies won valuable concessions… News Corporation, Liberty Mutual, Anheuser-Busch, Comcast and P.&G. wrote letters or dispatched lobbyists to argue for the high-tax exception</b>. After months of meetings with lobbyists, the Treasury announced in June 2019 that it was creating a version of the exception that the companies had sought.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Enrich, financial editor for the Times, said the newspaper’s estimate that major companies received tens of billions of dollars in additional tax breaks thanks to the Treasury Department is “conservative.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“The cumulative effect,” said Enrich, “is that a tax law already disproportionately benefiting the richest of the rich has become an even greater windfall for the world’s largest companies and their shareholders.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Enrich</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">@davidenrich</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Replying to @davidenrich</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The ridiculous thing: companies appear to not be properly disclosing what they’re paying under these new taxes. Which makes it very hard to see how big this bonanza really is. Our estimate of tens of billions in savings is conservative. By @uwsgeezer https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/30/business/corporate-tax-cuts-impact.html …</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>A section of the Senate bill. Congress gave final approval to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on Dec. 20, 2017.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Why the Impact of the Trump Taxes Remains Partly Hidden</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">New taxes should be a big expense for many companies. But they have found a way around disclosing it in annual reports.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">nytimes.com</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, tweeted in response to the Times story that <b>“Trump is the most corrupt president in history</b>, and here’s the latest example of how that corruption helps giant corporations at the expense of small businesses and working families.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Too many corporations are cashing in on all the benefits of America while skipping out on the bill,” said Warren. “Companies that make massive profits shouldn’t be paying less in federal income taxes than working families.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As Hunter Blair of the Economic Policy Institute noted on the two-year anniversary of the passage of Trump’s tax cuts last week, “the $4,000 annual boost to average incomes that the White House Council of Economic Advisers promised to working families because of the [Tax Cuts and Jobs Act] did not—and will not—happen.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“While it’s been worse-than-advertised for working families,” Blair wrote, “the TCJA has been an even bigger boon to large corporations and rich households.”</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/house-dems-take-aim-at-trust-fund-babies-with-estate-tax-designed-to-combat-obscene-wealth-inequality/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/house-dems-take-aim-at-trust-fund-babies-with-estate-tax-designed-to-combat-obscene-wealth-inequality/</font></a></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">House Dems take aim at ‘trust fund babies’ with estate tax designed to combat obscene wealth inequality</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Advisor to the President Ivanka Trump addresses the G20 Women’s Empowerment Event in Osaka, Japan, Saturday, June 29 2019. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Written by Common Dreams October 26, 2019</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">California Congressman Jimmy Gomez on Friday introduced legislation in the Democrat-controlled U.S. House that aims to address “our country’s rapidly increasing wealth inequality by strengthening the estate tax and ensuring the wealthiest among us pay their fair share.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Trust fund babies who have done nothing to earn their wealth besides being born into the right family have no right to pay a lower tax rate on their millions than hard-working Americans do on the income that they work for.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">—Charlie Simmons, Patriotic Millionaires</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The For the 99.8% Act would impose a progressive tax on the estates of the richest Americans. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, introduced the companion bill in the Republican-controlled Senate in January.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Under the bill, “the families of all 588 billionaires in America would owe up to $2.2 trillion in estate taxes, amounting to revenue that can be used to address critical needs for working families and the most vulnerable among us,” according to Gomez’s office.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The ever-widening gap between the ultra-rich and the rest of us has reached alarming proportions and demands a strong legislative response,” Gomez, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement. “No longer can we allow this structural power imbalance—one where the billionaire-class hoards the very wealth working families helped to create—define our nation’s values and priorities.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gomez also thanked Sanders “for joining me in our shared mission to level the economic playing field for the working-class and transform our economy into one that works for every American.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“No longer can we allow this structural power imbalance… define our nation’s values and priorities.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">—Rep. Jimmy Gomez</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We are facing levels of inequality not seen since the Gilded Age of the robber barons, where the top one-tenth of one percent owns about as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent,” Sanders said Friday. “The richest 400 billionaires pay lower taxes than everyone else. In my view, this obscene inequality in wealth and political power is not compatible with a democratic society.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The White House hopeful added that “I am proud that Rep. Gomez is leading three dozen members of the House in introducing the For The 99.8% Act to tax today’s dynasty trusts and curb their power, while raising trillions of dollars for the essential programs we need as a country.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The House bill’s 37 original co-sponsors include Democratic Reps. Pramila Jayapal (Wash.) and Mark Pocan (Wis.) as well as the four freshmen congresswomen collectively known as “the Squad,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.).</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The bill is also backed by 80 national organizations that sent a letter of support to Congress Friday. The letter highlighted various provisions of the bill and pointed out that “the public overwhelmingly favors raising taxes on the wealthy—typically by a margin of 2 to 1.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“In my view, this obscene inequality in wealth and political power is not compatible with a democratic society.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">—Sen. Bernie Sanders</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Americans for Tax Fairness executive director Frank Clemente, whose group signed on to the letter, called the legislation “a critical step” toward creating “an economy that works for all of us, not just the wealthy few.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It will raise well over $300 billion,” Clemente noted, “that can be used to help people afford healthcare, improve our schools, and rebuild crumbling infrastructure across the country.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Patriotic Millionaires also signed the support letter. Retired tech executive Charlie Simmons, a member of the group, said in a statement that “as a millionaire who will end up paying the estate tax, I say that we should expand it.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Tax my estate,” said Simmons. “Trust fund babies who have done nothing to earn their wealth besides being born into the right family have no right to pay a lower tax rate on their millions than hard-working Americans do on the income that they work for.”</font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">no lnx</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">These billionaires are begging for the US government to raise their taxes</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">written by Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams</span><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" white-space="white-space" pre="pre"> </span><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">June 24, 2019</span></font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">39</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">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.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Published by the New York Times, the letter (pdf) reads in part:</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">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.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">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.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">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.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">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.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Seth Hanlon</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">@SethHanlon</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"> NEW LETTER TO PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES: </font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">61% of Americans support a wealth tax.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">So do some very prominent people who would pay it.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/business/economy/wealth-tax-letter.html …</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">68</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">6:20 AM - Jun 24, 2019</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">54 people are talking about this</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Twitter Ads info and privacy</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“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.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">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.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“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.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Ian Simmons</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">@isimmons</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"> 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 </font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">64</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">3:32 AM - Jun 24, 2019</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Twitter Ads info and privacy</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">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.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">A Message From the Billionaire’s Club: Tax Us</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">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.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">nytimes.com</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">42 people are talking about this</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">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.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Hughes told the Times that “one thing that we collectively want to see is further research and more activism on policy design.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The letter came as Americans for Tax Fairness Action Fund on Monday launched a website detailing the tax proposals of each Democratic presidential candidate.</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“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.”</font></p><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">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.”</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></p><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></font></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/effective-tax-policy-that-thwarts-plutocratic-power-building-hinges-upon-this-key-detail/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/effective-tax-policy-that-thwarts-plutocratic-power-building-hinges-upon-this-key-detail/</font></a></font></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Effective tax policy that thwarts plutocratic power-building hinges upon this key detail</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">written by Chuck Collins / YES! Magazine<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>June 26, 2019</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When we talk about the wealthy, who are we really referring to? Is it the billionaires on private jets? The neighbors up the street who seem to always have the flashiest new cars and exotic vacation photos?</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This election season, a number of candidates have floated proposals to tax the wealthy to address extreme inequality and finance new spending programs. Often left unsaid is which segment of the wealthy they’re referring to and why taxing the very rich is necessary for everyone to prosper, both to raise revenue and put a brake on the undemocratic concentration of wealth and power. The truth is we need these taxes on the rich, now more than ever. To get there, we need a deeper understanding of who we mean by “the rich.”</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A decade ago, journalist Robert Frank offered a helpful overview of the wealthy in his 2007 book, Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Book and the Lives of the New Rich. I’ve adapted Frank’s concept to present a road atlas to the villages of today’s Richistan, USA. These villages include: Affluentville, Lower Richistan, Middle Richistan, Upper Richistan, and Ultra-Wealthyville.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Affluentville is home to most of those in the top 10 percent of the wealth distribution. Residents of Affluentville have household incomes over $150,000 and personal wealth, defined as assets minus debts, ranging from $1 million up to about $3 million. Their ranks total about 10 million households.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Most residents of Affluentville draw their income from high-end salaries, so they will be more directly affected by tax increases on earned income—unlike those in upper Richistan, whose income comes from investments and capital gains.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">They may drive nicer cars, but still sit in traffic on the way to work. They are very concerned that their kids don’t lose economic status. Thus, they invest heavily in tilting the scales in their favor—hoarding public K-12 education dollars into the wealthiest school districts, securing legacy admissions to top-tier universities and internships at their friends’ law firms.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tax policies that are aimed at Upper Richistan but reduces the cost of higher education and health care could win allies in Affluentville. This includes U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ College for All and Medicare for All bills, as well as U.S. Sen. Cory Booker’s American Opportunity Accounts baby bond bill.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lower Richistan includes approximately 3 million households with total wealth between $3 million and $10 million. According to our analysis of the 2013 Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finance, adjusted to 2015 figures, these are the 98th and 99th wealth percentiles.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lower Richistanis populate upscale restaurants, country clubs, and luxury vacation destinations. They likely have second homes. They still fly on commercial airlines, but often sit in first class.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The income and wealth of this group comes from business ownership, high salaries, stock investments, and inheritances. Lower Richistanis are among the political influencers, a group that grows the higher up the income and wealth ladder you go.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If the objective of tax policy is to thwart plutocratic power-building, then we need to aim higher than Lower and Middle Richistan. If the goal is to maximize revenue, from say a luxury real estate transfer tax or broad-based income tax, then you want to include these folks.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Middle Richistan is inhabited by the almost 2 million households that represent most of the top 1 percent of wealth holders. The wealthiest 1 percent have assets over $10 million, and average $26 million.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Middle Richistan is where residents start to own their own jets, or at least fractional ownership of a private plane. They own multiple homes. Many have yachts.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The people in this group have been huge beneficiaries of four decades of tax cuts, neoliberal trade policies, and other public policies that benefit asset owners at the expense of wage earners.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sen. Sanders’ progressive estate tax bill, “For the 99.8% Act,” would tax the estates of those who inherit more than $3.5 million with a sliding scale rate that rises to a 60 percent rate on wealth transfers over $1 billion.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Upper Richistan is home to roughly 160,000 households with wealth between $20 million and $100 million, the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. Their incomes alone start at about $3 million annually. This group received more than 90 percent of the income and wealth gains in the decades after the 2008 economic meltdown.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Upper Richistanis must come up with creative strategies to hoard their wealth and influence. These includes using private charitable foundations that fund right-wing think tanks, co-opt academic institutions, and support campaigns on their favorite issues.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Raising the income tax rate to 70 percent on Upper Richistani income over $10 million, as proposed by U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, would raise an estimated $720 billion over a decade. Unfortunately, it would not touch income from capital gains and dividends that accounts for half the income of this group.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A potentially more effective way to tax this group would be to tax all adjusted gross income over $2 million with a 10-percent surtax. Because it would include capital gains income, it would raise $75 billion annually and over $850 billion over the next decade, even with a lower rate.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ultra-Wealthyville is home to the 16,000 households in the richest 1 percent of the 1 percent (the 0.01%), including the roughly 540 billionaires in the U.S. They have wealth starting at $110 million and incomes starting at $11 million.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Some of them, but not all, own private jets, but they could if they wanted to. They collect houses around the globe, many of which function merely for “wealth storage,” parking their money in a place that’s safer than financial markets.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Their income comes almost entirely from capital gains, so they don’t mind increases in the income tax rate; just don’t touch investment income.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">They’re known for dodging taxes. Research suggests that households in the top 0.01 percent with wealth over $40 million, evade 25 percent of personal income and wealth taxes. According to one estimate, this is roughly $7.6 trillion, or 10 percent of the world’s wealth. Thus, we need a much bigger investment in tax enforcement for this group.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposed annual wealth tax would institute a higher 3 percent rate on assets over $1 billion. The total tax would generate an estimated $2.75 trillion in revenue over 10 years. No candidate has yet come forward with a luxury consumption tax, such as a tax on private jets, which would fall largely on this group’s largesse.</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></font></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the end, all residents of Richistan need to be called on to pay their fair share of taxes and to make meaningful contributions to the well-being of the country and the planet. This starts with understanding who these people are and how a serious restructuring of the rules can get us there.</font></font></font></div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></font></font></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></font></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">pro pub 619</font></font></font></p><div class="top-notes" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1.25em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit;" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color"><div class="note" id="newsletter-txt-note" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625; vertical-align: baseline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom based in New York. Sign up for ProPublica’s <a href="https://go.propublica.org/20181219-apple" style="font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 2px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(26, 162, 230); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none;">Big Story</a> newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.</font></font></p></div></div><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="1.0" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The owners of a 70-story Panama City hotel tower formerly managed by President Donald Trump’s companies are accusing them of stiffing the Panamanian government.</font></font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="1.1" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a legal filing Monday in an ongoing lawsuit in Manhattan federal court, private equity manager Orestes Fintiklis and the company he leads, Ithaca Capital Partners, claimed that two Trump companies failed to pay Panamanian taxes equal to 12.5% of the management fees they drew from the hotel.</font></font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="1.2" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Trump entities were allegedly supposed to withhold those fees in advance and pay them to the government regardless of whether the property was profitable or not. Instead, the Trump companies simply kept the money, the suit claims, “thus intentionally evading taxes.” That and other financial irregularities exposed Fintiklis and the companies he represents “to millions of dollars in liability,” according to the suit, which also claims Trump companies sought to cover up their actions. The filing does not say whether a tax penalty has been levied by Panamanian authorities.</font></font></p><p data-pp-blocktype="copy" data-pp-id="1.3" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 1em; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.625;" tiempos="tiempos" text="text" georgia="Georgia" times="times" new="new" roman="roman" serif="serif" vertical-align="vertical-align" baseline="baseline" color="color" rgb="rgb" background-color="background-color"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fintiklis declined to comment...</font></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></font></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></font></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">wm koch</font></font></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></font></font></p><header class="entry-header" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><h2 class="entry-title" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.75em; line-height: 1.2; letter-spacing: 0.73px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://news.littlesis.org/2019/05/07/these-top-fossil-fuel-utilities-companies-didnt-pay-any-federal-income-taxes-last-year/" rel="bookmark" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">These Top Fossil Fuel & Utilities Companies Didn’t Pay Any Federal Income Taxes Last Year</font></a></font></font></h2><div class="entry-meta" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-transform: uppercase; margin-bottom: 0.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /></font></font><div class="byline" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: inline; letter-spacing: 0.4px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">BY <a href="https://news.littlesis.org/author/derek/" title="Posts by Derek Seidman" class="author url fn" rel="author" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">DEREK SEIDMAN</a></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div> <div class="posted-on" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: inline; letter-spacing: 0.4px;">MAY 7, 2019</div></div></header><div class="entry-content" style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 1.5;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1rem;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Some of the biggest oil, gas, and utilities companies in the U.S. paid no federal income taxes last year – and they even received billions in tax rebates.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1rem;"><a class="read-more" href="https://news.littlesis.org/2019/05/07/these-top-fossil-fuel-utilities-companies-didnt-pay-any-federal-income-taxes-last-year/" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent; padding-bottom: 0.5em; text-transform: uppercase; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(134, 142, 150); font-weight: 600;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; padding-bottom: 0.5em; text-transform: uppercase; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(134, 142, 150);"><b>READ MORE</b></span><span style="box-sizing: border-box; padding-bottom: 0.5em; text-transform: uppercase; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(134, 142, 150);"><b> </b></span><span style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent; padding-bottom: 0.5em; text-transform: uppercase; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(134, 142, 150); font-weight: 600;">→</span></font></a></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1rem;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 1rem;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Most people in the U.S. need to pay federal income taxes – but dozens of the most profitable U.S. corporations do not. <br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 1rem;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A <a href="https://itep.org/notadime/" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">recent report</a> by the Institute on Tax and Economic Policy finds that 60 profitable companies that are on the Fortune 500 list paid no federal income taxes in 2018. These include many well known brands, such as Netflix, JetBlue, Goodyear, and Avis. The list also include Amazon – the most valuable company in the world, whose CEO, Jeff Bezos, is the world’s richest person.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 1rem;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All told, the 60 companies on the list did not merely avoid paying $16.4 billion in federal income taxes – they actually received a net tax rebate of $4.3 billion.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 1rem;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While Amazon’s presence on the list has garnered <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/us/politics/democrats-taxes-2020.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">headlines</a>, what’s less noted is that a whopping 40% – 24 of the 60 companies – are tied to the oil, gas, and utilities industries. <br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 1rem;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The fossil fuel and utilities companies on the list include powerhouses like Chevron, Halliburton, Kinder Morgan, and Duke Energy, as well as some lesser known firms. Of the 24 companies, 13 are categorized as utilities and 9 are categorized as oil, gas, and pipelines companies. Another two are in other sectors but do significant business with the oil and gas industry.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 1rem;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With two dozen major fossil fuel-tied companies paying zero dollars in federal income taxes, or even receiving tax rebates, while they also report big profits, one thing is clear: the very industry that is driving rising carbon emissions and our climate crisis is also, in effect, being subsidized to do so by the U.S. tax structure.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 1rem;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bolder;">What top oil, gas, and utilities companies avoided taxes?</span></span><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 1rem;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We’ve provided a table at the end of this article that lists the 24 profitable Fortune 500 oil, gas, and utilities companies that avoided paying federal taxes in 2018. These 24 companies reported a total of $38.119 billion in 2018 income, and they received $2.059 billion in tax rebates. This means that nearly half of the $4.3 billion in tax rebates to the 60 companies that the report identified went to these 24 companies.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 1rem;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To put it another way: on the whole, fossil fuel-tied corporations that are driving our climate crisis disproportionately benefited from paying no federal income taxes.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 1rem;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With a <a href="https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-does-corporate-income-tax-work" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">21% corporate income tax</a> on profits of U.S. companies, these companies should have paid over $8 billion in taxes.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 1rem;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The 13 electric utilities companies on the list reported a total of $19.117 billion in 2018 income but received $1.215 billion in tax rebates. The 9 oil, gas, and pipeline companies on the list took in $18.284 billion in income and received $580 million in tax rebates.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 1rem;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The top beneficiaries of the tax system among these companies included:</b><br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /></font></p><ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 2em 0px 2em 15px; padding-left: 10px;"><li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Duke Energy, </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">with a $647 million tax rebate, resulting in an effective federal income tax rate of minus-21%</span></font></li><li style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Wisconsin Energy, with a $218 million tax rebate, resulting in an effective federal income tax rate of minus-19%</font></li><li style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0.5em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">AECOM had a $122 million rebate (minus-51% effective tax rate) and Celanese had a $142 million rebate (minus-30% effective tax rate). Both companies do significant business with the oil and gas industry (more on this below)</font></li></ul><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1rem;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Chevron and EOG Resources also received $181 million and $304 million in tax rebates, respectively, though their effective tax rates were only minus-4% and minus-7% since they bring in so much income.<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 1rem;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here are some other observations about the companies on the list:<br style="box-sizing: border-box;" /></font></p><ul style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 2em 0px 2em 15px; padding-left: 10px;"><li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bolder;">Top fracking & drilling companies</span>. Nine of the companies in the report are top U.S. oil and gas drillers. Corporations like Chevron, Devon Energy, EOG Resources, Pioneer Natural Resources, and Occidental Petroleum dominate <a href="https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/11/24/the-biggest-oil-producers-in-the-united-states.aspx" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">the list</a> of top overall U.S. oil and gas producers, as well top drillers in fracking epicenters like <a href="https://www.rrc.state.tx.us/media/43948/top32producers2017.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Texas</a> and <a href="http://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/drilling/operators/" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">Pennsylvania</a>. Two companies – Occidental and Chevron – are the first and second biggest drillers in the Texas Permian Basin, the world’s busiest oil field, and they are currently in a bidding war to acquire Anadarko Petroleum to further consolidate their market share.  </font></li></ul><ul style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 2em 0px 2em 15px; padding-left: 10px;"><li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bolder;">Controversial pipeline projects</span>. The U.S. corporate tax structure is also subsidizing companies that are behind controversial oil and gas pipeline. Dominion and Duke are the two biggest owners of the 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which has spurred intense opposition that has contributed to significant delays in the pipeline’s construction. Until last year, Kinder Morgan owned the Trans Mountain Pipeline, which transports dirty tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada.</font></li></ul><ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 2em 0px 2em 15px; padding-left: 10px;"><li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bolder;">Powerful utilities</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">13 major electric utilities are on the list of 60 tax-avoiding corporations – nearly a quarter of the list. They are: Ameren, American Electric Power, Atmos Energy, CMS Energy, Dominion Resources, DTE Energy, Duke Energy, FirstEnergy, PPL, Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG), UGI, Wisconsin Energy, and Xcel Energy.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> 12 of those 13 are among the </span><a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/237773/the-largest-electric-utilities-in-the-us-based-on-market-value/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none;">top 20</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> of the largest U.S. utilities based on market value (only UGI fails to make the cut). Some of these utilities, like Dominion and Duke, may be the most power corporate entities in the states where they are headquartered. Some of them have also faced controversies over everything from dumping </span><a href="https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/politics-columns-blogs/under-the-dome/article80534322.html" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none;">coal ash</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> to </span><a href="https://www.energyandpolicy.org/natural-gas-drives-profits-for-dte-energy/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none;">expanding gas operations</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> to </span><a href="https://www.energyandpolicy.org/firstenergy-bailout/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none;">begging for bailouts</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. The fact that all these companies paid no federal income taxes appears more egregious considering that many utilities are granted monopolies (or near-monopolies) in the areas where they operate and are guaranteed profits by government regulators.</span></font></li></ul><ul style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin: 2em 0px 2em 15px; padding-left: 10px;"><li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: bolder;">Other companies that profit from oil and gas operations</span>. Some companies on the list profit from the fossil fuel industry even as they aren’t central players. AECOM, the engineering and construction powerhouse, has <a href="https://www.aecom.com/markets/oil-gas-chemicals/" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">oil and gas clients</a> across the globe and works on fossil fuel infrastructure <a href="https://www.aecom.com/projects/?qm%5B%5D=2455" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">projects</a>. Celanese, a chemical company, makes <a href="https://www.celanese.com/engineered-materials/OilAndGas" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">plastic materials</a> that are used in oil and gas <a href="https://www.celanese.com/industries/chemicals/oil-and-gas-extraction.aspx" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">extraction</a>operations and in <a href="https://www.celanese.com/industries/oil-gas-and-mining/pipe-and-liner.aspx" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">pipelines</a>.</font></li></ul><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1rem;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here is <a href="https://littlesis.org/maps/4039-here-are-10-major-fossil-fuel-utilities-companies-that-paid-no-2018-federal-income-taxes" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration-line: none; background-color: transparent;">a visual map</a> of ten of the most well-known oil, gas, and utilities companies that paid no federal incomes taxes in 2018:</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 1rem;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">,...</font></p></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/trump-admits-it-was-sport-to-dodge-taxes-after-nyt-details-epic-business-failures/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/trump-admits-it-was-sport-to-dodge-taxes-after-nyt-details-epic-business-failures/</a></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">new</font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/you-cant-tax-the-rich-without-salvaging-the-irs/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/you-cant-tax-the-rich-without-salvaging-the-irs/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The hot policy in Democratic circles these days is raising taxes on the rich. <a href="https://projects.propublica.org/represent/members/W000817-elizabeth-warren" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Sen. Elizabeth Warren</a> has a plan to tax “ultramillionaires,” as she calls them. <a href="https://projects.propublica.org/represent/members/S000033-bernard-sanders" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Sen. Bernie Sanders</a> wants to expand the estate tax. <a href="https://projects.propublica.org/represent/members/O000172-alexandria-ocasio-cortez" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez</a> has floated raising the top income tax rate to 70% for those making over $10 million a year.</font></p><div class="p1_23" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But before this country raises taxes, it should grapple with something much more prosaic but equally important for tackling inequality: saving the Internal Revenue Service.</font></p><div class="p2_23" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="alt_ad_block story-page-in-content-graph-2" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="teadsNative" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Already, wealthy people and corporations easily get around today’s rules. However tough any new laws might seem, they’d soon be undercut.</font></p><div class="p3_23" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Slowly and quietly over the past eight years, the IRS <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">has been eviscerated</a>. It’s lost tens of thousands of employees. It has fewer auditors now than at any time since 1953. In real dollars, the agency’s budget has dropped by almost $3 billion since 2010.</b></font></p><div class="p4_23" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Businesses and the wealthy benefit the most from this state of affairs. The largest corporations in America used to be audited every year. That started to change when the cuts began, and today, the audit rate has fallen by half. It’s a similar story for individuals making $10 million or more a year: With twice the chance of escaping IRS scrutiny, the ultrarich are much less likely to lose at the game of audit roulette.</font></p><div class="p5_23" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fixing the problem will require more than increasing the IRS’ budget (though that would certainly help). It’s about having the right personnel with the right skills. Today, the wealthy and corporations have the IRS outgunned. The ultra-affluent — with the help of legions of tax professionals — make domestic income disappear overseas or hide it in a pyramid of partnerships. It’s like trying to take on a modern army while armed with spears and clubs.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">The IRS has difficulty tracing the income of the superwealthy or countering their sophisticated arguments about why what appears to be one type of income is actually something else. The agency has also trouble valuing their assets (a problem that,</span><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"> </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html" style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" box-sizing="box-sizing" border-box="border-box" outline="outline" none="none" margin="margin" px="px" padding="padding" text-decoration-line="text-decoration-line" transition="transition" color="color" s="s" ease="ease" cursor="cursor" pointer="pointer">as The New York Times revealed</a><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">, dates back at least to when Fred Trump was misleading the IRS about how much his buildings were worth). By the public admission of numerous IRS officials,</span><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"> </span><a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/ultrawealthy-taxes-irs-internal-revenue-service-global-high-wealth-audits" style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" box-sizing="box-sizing" border-box="border-box" outline="outline" none="none" margin="margin" px="px" padding="padding" text-decoration-line="text-decoration-line" transition="transition" color="color" s="s" ease="ease" cursor="cursor" pointer="pointer">it has long done a poor job</a><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large"> </span><span style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large">of scrutinizing complicated partnerships to understand who owns what portion of what stock.</span></font></span></p><div class="p7_23" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The top 0.5% of highest-earning Americans account for about a fifth of the income that’s hidden from the IRS, <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5219189-The-Distribution-of-Tax-Noncompliance.html#document/p10" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">according to one University of Michigan study</a>, or more than $50 billion a year in today’s dollars.</b></font></p><div class="p8_23" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s much easier to enforce the tax laws for the bottom 90% of earners. Wages are reported straight to the IRS, and computers can easily check that tax returns accurately report that income. This means that inadequate enforcement of the tax laws necessarily has a regressive effect, liberating those at the top from scrutiny while the masses continue to be tracked by machines.</font></p><div class="p9_23" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With its budget slashed, the IRS has pulled back across the board — except for one area where it’s been easier to keep the numbers from falling so much: <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/earned-income-tax-credit-irs-audit-working-poor" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">audits of the poor</a>. More than one-third of all audit targets are recipients of the earned income tax credit, one of the nation’s largest anti-poverty programs. By the hundreds of thousands, IRS computers spit out letters that require low-income taxpayers to prove their eligibility. The <a href="https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/eitc-audit" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">counties with the highest audit rates</a> aren’t found in the hedge fund precincts of Connecticut or the lobbyist enclaves of Northern Virginia. No, they’re rural, mostly African American counties in the Deep South.</font></p><div class="p10_23" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There’s nothing easy about auditing the rich. Even when the IRS has evidence of flat-out cheating, such as when it discovers a hidden Swiss bank account, it can take years of work to prove its case. Taking such time clashes with one of the core ways the IRS evaluates its managers and agents: how efficiently they open and close audits. As one senior manager <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">put it to us</a>, “If you’re not churning out the exams, you have to explain why you’re not.”</font></p><div class="p11_23" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But more often, the affairs of the superwealthy are infernally complicated and the IRS doesn’t have black-and-white proof of evasion. Instead, the agency runs up against what’s called “aggressive” planning in the tax world. To the rich, a tax return is just an opening offer to the government. If they don’t get audited, that’s great. If they do, well, they’re ready for a fight.</font></p><div class="p12_23" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2009, the IRS decided to take a bold, new approach <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/ultrawealthy-taxes-irs-internal-revenue-service-global-high-wealth-audits" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">to auditing the superwealthy</a>. The agency’s idea was to bring specialists together and form a kind of green-eyeshade-wearing Delta Force. It would finally do something it — surprisingly — hadn’t been doing before: look at the entirety of a taxpayer’s empire. That meant examining how his partnerships, limited liability companies, foundations, gifts and overseas operations interact with one another. The ultrarich weave all these together so they end up with an ultralow effective tax rate. “We hadn’t really been looking at it all together, and shame on us,” Steven Miller, a former acting commissioner of the IRS, told us.</font></p><div class="p13_23" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/ultrawealthy-taxes-irs-internal-revenue-service-global-high-wealth-audits" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Because of budget cuts and lobbying</a>, this elite force never came together. The agency hoped to have a staff of about 240 expert auditors by 2012. But by 2014 it had 96, and by last year the number had fallen to 58. Initially spooked by the group’s ambition, tax professionals who counsel the wealthy now speak of the effort with a kind of pity.</font></p><div class="p14_23" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Criminal tax enforcement has also faltered. More than 150 million income tax returns were filed in 2017, but <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/after-budget-cuts-the-irs-work-against-tax-cheats-is-facing-collapse" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">the IRS brought fewer than 800 cases</a> in which someone was charged with making legal income but criminally evading taxes. That’s one reason tax cheats can get away with brazen behavior for so long — until they attract the attention of federal investigators for other reasons. That’s what happened to the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and the former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty to tax evasion, and the celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti, who was charged with failing to file taxes at all for several years. (Avenatti denies the charges.)</font></p><div class="p15_23" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">So, what to do? One 2020 candidate already has a bold proposal to resuscitate the IRS. It’s a plan to pump tens of billions into the agency, enough to fund a second army of agents. That candidate’s name is Donald Trump.</font></p><div class="p16_23" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Of course, it was Trump’s party that gutted the agency, costing the country, <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">we estimate</a>, more than $100 billion in lost revenue. <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/budget-fy2020.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">The president’s 2020 budget</a>, however, did propose adding $15 billion over 10 years to the IRS enforcement budget, a move that would more than double the agency’s overall budget. The administration estimated this would produce revenue of at least $47 billion. The question arises: Has the administration genuinely had a change of heart? Or is this merely a neat trick to make deficit projections appear smaller?</font></p><div class="p17_23" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So far, this is all just talk. It is, though, one of the few areas where Trump and Democrats are in substantive agreement. Democrats in the House recently proposed a $400 million IRS budget increase next year.</font></p><div class="p18_23" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Among the Democratic presidential candidates, Warren does mention the IRS in her wealth tax proposal. <a href="https://elizabethwarren.com/ultra-millionaire-tax/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">She calls for an unspecified</a> but “significant increase in the IRS enforcement budget” and a minimum audit rate for taxpayers subject to her “ultramillionaire” tax.</font></p><div class="p19_23" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Raising taxes on the rich is a more compelling cause than increasing the operating budget of a bureaucracy most American voters probably hate thinking about. But the boldest tax plan of all starts with salvaging the IRS.</font></p><div class="p20_23" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.</font></span></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><span class="mw-headline"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">--</font></span></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">NEW</font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">comm dr</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/11/warrens-bold-new-tax-plan-would-raise-over-1-trillion-richest-biggest-us" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none; outline: 0px;" pt="PT" serif="Serif" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" font-size="font-size" px="px"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Warren's Bold New Tax Plan Would Raise Over $1 Trillion From 'Richest, Biggest' US Corporations</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/11/bolstered-trump-tax-scam-number-us-corporations-paying-not-dime-federal-taxes"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/11/bolstered-trump-tax-scam-number-us-corporations-paying-not-dime-federal-taxes</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no pix (famous post card for tax return]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</div><div><b>Bolstered by Trump Tax Scam, Number of US Corporations Paying 'Not a Dime' in Federal Taxes Doubled in 2018</b></div><div><b>
</b></div><div>"Corporations zeroing out their tax bills or paying single-digit federal tax rates mean a substantial loss in federal revenue. Calls to cut critical programs and services in the wake of these corporate tax cuts are absolutely connected."</div><div>
</div><div>byEoin Higgins, staff writer</div><div> 17 Comments</div><div>
</div><div>In 2017, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Tex.), joined by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis), right, holds a proposed <b>"postcard tax filing form"</b> as they unveiled the GOP’s far-reaching tax overhaul bill.  (Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP) <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">[intuit lobby killed free tax prep/simpl, support grover]</span></div><div>
</div><div><b>A new analysis out Thursday shows that tax policy under the Trump administration is benefitting large corporations to such a degree that twice as many large companies will pay nothing in federal taxes for 2018 compared to previous years.</b></div><div>
</div><div>The report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which comes less than a week before tax day in the United States on April 15, found that<b> 60 companies—including Amazon, Netflix, Activision Blizzard, General Motors, and IBM—used "a diverse array of legal tax breaks" to bring their federal tax liability to zero.</b></div><div>
</div><div>"For years, corporations have manipulated the system to avoid paying taxes, and it's clear that the 2017 tax law did nothing to change this," said Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at ITEP and lead author of the report.</div><div>
</div><div>See the complete list of U.S. companies which paid "not a dime" in federal taxes last year here.</div><div>
</div><div>"In many cases, American taxpayers are subsidizing THEM," writer David Beard noted on Twitter. </div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>As IETP said in a statement announcing the study's results:</div><div>
</div><div>The tax-avoiding corporations are some of the most profitable, recognizable companies in the world, and they represent a variety of industries, including technology, energy and gas, financial services, aviation, pharmaceutical and manufacturing. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Earlier this year, ITEP reported Netflix and Amazon paid no federal taxes. Other companies on this list include Chevron, Delta Airlines, Eli Lilly, General Motors, Gannett, Goodyear Tire and Rubber, Halliburton, IBM, Jetblue Airways, Principal Financial, Salesforce.com, US Steel, and Whirlpool.</span></div><div>
</div><div>These companies avoided taxes by employing a variety of legal tax breaks. Accelerated depreciation allows companies to write off the cost of their investments much faster than these investments wear out. This break accounted for hundreds of millions in tax write-offs. Chevron alone, for example, reported $290 million in accelerated depreciation, and Halliburton reported $320 million.</div><div>
</div><div>According to the institute, U.S. lawmakers "interested in enacting true tax reform should critically assess the costs of each of existing tax break—including those discussed in this report—and take steps to ensure that profitable corporations pay their fair share of U.S. taxes."</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">One of those lawmakers is Sen. Elizabeth <b>Warren (D-Mass.)—a Democratic presidential candidate for the 2020 election—who on Thursday released her Real Corporate Profits Tax bill. The proposed legislation would impose a flat 7 percent tax on American corporations with profits over $100 million, </b>as Common Dreams reported.</span> </div><div>
</div><div>"Some of the biggest corporations in the country make huge profits but pay zero federal corporate income taxes on those profits," Warren said in a Medium post explaining the bill. </div><div>
</div><div>Gardner explained to the Center for Public Integrity and NBC News that the Trump tax cuts in 2017—which dropped the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%—are the main driver behind both the reduction in corporate taxes for 2018 and the increase in companies paying nothing.</div><div>
</div><div>"The specter of big corporations avoiding all income taxes on billions in profits sends a strong and corrosive signal to Americans," said Gardner, "that the tax system is stacked against them, in favor of corporations and the wealthiest Americans."</div><div>
</div><div>Still, the money has to go somewhere. Adam Smith, a campaign finance advocate, had an idea of where that he shared on Twitter. </div><div>
</div><div>"I wonder how many lobbyists these companies pay for each year," said Smith.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>What's clear to Gardner is that the loss of federal revenue is not without far-reaching repercussions.</div><div>
</div><div>"We cannot pretend that corporate tax avoidance has no cost," said Gardner. "Corporations zeroing out their tax bills or paying single-digit federal tax rates mean a substantial loss in federal revenue. Calls to cut critical programs and services in the wake of these corporate tax cuts are absolutely connected."</div><div>
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</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see also offshore banks</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/how-a-failing-capitalist-system-is-allowing-amazon-to-cripple-america/ Capitalism is failing in America, and Amazon is both the cause and beneficiary of much of the breakdown.  Jeff Bezos said, “We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.” He might have added three capitalist practices familiar to his company: (1) Pay no taxes; (2) Drive competitors out of business; and (3) Exploit workers. Anarcho-Capitalism: The Sordid Details of Amazon’s Tax Avoidance In 2018, according to its own SEC filings, Amazon claimed a refund on its $11 billion in U.S. profits. It did the same on nearly $6 billion in profits in 2017. The company has reportedly positioned itself to avoid even more future taxes with unspecified tax credits.In the most extreme form of capitalism taxes do not exist. This is called “anarcho-capitalism.” A mong all corporations, Amazon may be the leading advocate of this philosophy. They haven’t paid federal income tax for the past two years. They set up headquarters in Luxembourg for tax breaks that are now being challenged. They claim minimal profits on hundreds of billions in revenue, resulting in one of the lowest profit margins among major corporations, and thus much less tax. Of course, Amazon claims to be using tax credits from past losses that stemmed from investment in research and development (R&D). But the company appears to overstate and obfuscate the R&D numbers. Its only ‘explanation’ of R&D in its annual report comes in an ambiguously all-encompassing section called “Technology and Content.” Plus, that’s no excuse to dodge taxes. Walmart and Google each spent nearly $12 billion on technology in 2018, almost as much as Amazon, but Walmart paid 28 percent in federal taxes, and Google 14 percent.We learn much more at the state level. Amazon has played one state against another for tax breaks over the years, most recently negotiating an estimated $3 billion tax credit from the state of New York before residents rebelled — as well they should have. The Economic Policy Institute found that employment levels don’t significantly change in communities with new Amazon warehouses, and a recent study by The Economist concluded that the opening of a fulfillment center in a given community actually depresses warehouse wages. Furthermore, as an indication of the folly of wooing corporations with state subsidies, Upjohn research found that in the great majority of cases incentives are not even a part of a company’s decision to locate in a given area.Most insidiously, Amazon’s seemingly fair-minded acceptance of state sales taxes likely has a dark side. For years the company fought the state tax as it built a competitive advantage over smaller firms. Now that it’s firmly established, online variety and convenience have replaced price as the primary incentives for most consumers, and so Amazon now supports a sales tax, very likely to discourage competition. Evidence comes from one study that found Walmart 34 percent cheaper than Amazon in four of five product categories.Monopoly: Amazon and the Killing of Competition Kiplinger compiled a remarkable list of 49 companies, many of them familiar to almost all Americans, that are in danger of being driven out of business by Amazon. One of them, Toys ‘r’ Us, has already succumbed. Sears is nearly gone. Others include Barnes & Noble, Kroger, Rite Aid, Best Buy, Etsy, Yelp, Pandora, and even stalwarts like Target and Trader Joe’s and UPS and Fedex and Office Depot and Staples. Investopedia agrees, adding Macy’s and even Walgreen’s and CVS and Costco.In a summary of “The Myth of Capitalism,” by Jonathan Tepper and Denise Hearn, it is argued that “an increase in market concentration across the United States has resulted in a system that is not true capitalism, since freedom is being restricted…Amazon is crushing retailers…It can determine what products can and cannot sell on its platform, and it competes with any customer that encounters success.” Columbia University and UN economist Howard Steven Friedman adds, “Monopolies are one example of capitalism failing. Monopolies have virtually no competition and can dictate prices to their customers unless they are restricted by regulators.”Of course, along the way Amazon has destroyed or dismantled or discouraged many smaller businesses. Like the jewelry store in New Mexico owned by Candelora Versace, who said her customers have started buying gems online, in part to avoid state taxes, and then visiting her store just for the settings. She considers the far-reaching effects of Amazon’s tax avoidance: “The roads don’t pay themselves. The schools don’t fund themselves…When they don’t want to pay the tax, it cheats us.”Labor in Decline: The Economic and Physical Abuse of Amazon’s Workers Amazon warehouse workers make about $13 per hour. That’s not a living wage for a U.S. family of four, and not even for a single person in many areas of the country. So the employees of this super-rich company turn to food stamps, letting U.S. taxpayers take care of them. In Ohio and Pennsylvania, one in ten Amazon workers were recently on SNAP. In Arizona, one in three. Along with the low pay comes intolerable working conditions, with overheated warehouses and employees using water bottles to avoid bathroom breaks in order to meet their schedules. And worse, employees have suffered workplace injuries that leave them homeless, disabled, or unable to earn an income. Employees are also forced to deal with constant surveillance, anti-union press ure, and the threat of losing their jobs. Much of Amazon’s over-hyped R&D spending is focused on the development of robots to replace human workers.Capitalism has failed workers, and it has caused a surge in inequality that gets worse with each passing year. In Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty showed that for 40 years, from 1970 to 2010, labor’s share of national income (wages and salaries) has declined. Stanford research reveals that “the declining labor share at the economy level is driven by the growth of large firms.” Like Amazon.A Good Reason for Democratic Socialism There may be no better argument for democratic socialism in America than the way individual state leaders have been falling over each other trying to lure corporations to their states with tax subsidies. We Americans have never been able to cooperate in ending this pointless waste of tax money that should be going to education and jobs and infrastructure.Does Jeff Bezos have any sense of social responsibility for all the societal benefits heaped upon his company? Amazon has arguably benefited more than any other company from what The Economist calls the “game-changing breakthroughs” of the Internet, which was built with our tax money through the National Science Foundation since the 1980s, and before that by the taxpayer-funded Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Fortune refers to Amazon’s actions as “extracting public money for its own enrichment.”But perhaps the Amazon boss doesn’t care. According to The Atlantic, “Bezos has argued that there is not enough philanthropic need on earth for him to spend his billions on.” If that truly reflects the man’s attitude, it shows an incomprehensible ignorance or disdain on his part. Bezos himself said, “The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel…I am going to use my financial lottery winnings from Amazon to fund that.”Good work, Jeff. Benefit from seventy years of public inventiveness and productivity and funding, and then fly off to the skies before you have to pay for it.=   = Netflix charges more per month for you to use its service than it paid in income taxes all last year"Netflix posted its largest-ever U.S. profit in 2018—$845 million—on which it didn't pay a dime in federal or state income taxes," writes ITEP senior fellow Matthew Gardner. In fact, the streaming giant received a $22 million return.https://www.alternet.org/tax-cheating-its-not-just-trumps radio shows and talks from London to Boston to Richmond, Ind., people keep asking me how the Trump family got away with stealing a half billion dollars, in today’s money, from our government, as The New York Times reported last month.This story first appeared at DC Report.One big part of the answer is that Congress showers real estate investors with tax benefits. It also makes auditing many types of real estate transactions incredibly tedious and time-consuming. Combine that with years of budget cuts and what we get is an IRS—the federal Tax Police Department—that is well suited to pursuing the financial equivalent of tricycle thefts, but not larceny on a billionaire scale.This may change. If we get a House or Senate under control of the Democrats we can expect thorough, expert investigations into Donald Trump’s recent personal, gift and business tax returns.Whether that turns into real tax reform, especially when it comes to landlords who cheat, will depend on whether the citizenry demands it. In turn, that will depend on  Congressional investigators. How clearly, powerfully and repetitively will they make the point that our tax system, by design, helps cheaters like the Trumps?Separate and Unequal TaxationThe story of how the Trumps got away with what The Times called “outright fraud” begins with understanding that America has two systems of individual income taxation, separate and unequal.One system relies on independent verification. It covers all workers, pensioners and, in the last decade thanks in part to my work, stock market investors. The other system is based on trust. Congress does not trust workers, but it assumes that people who run businesses are honest, so there is no need to independently verify the income they report.One system is reasonably well funded. The other is starved for funds and staff to enforce the tax laws. Guess which system the Trumps fall under.Long before Trump became president our Congress created a tax system that makes tax cheating by real estate families a breeze. By slashing the IRS staff—down a third in the last 25 years while the population grew by a quarter—the deck is stacked even more in favor of the Trumps.The harsh reality is that Congress does not trust workers. For decades it has required that employers withhold taxes before workers get their paychecks. The taxes, along with a detailed report of how much each worker earned, go straight to the Treasury.There is little cheating under that efficient and effective system, which is mostly automated. Indeed, 99% of income taxes due on wages are collected and turned over, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, reported last year.But when it comes to the traditional Republican base of small business owners the rate of reliable income reporting plummets, the GAO found.Landlords, farmers and sole proprietors and some others tell the IRS how much they made. For them, there is little to no third party verification.Instead of 99% accurate reporting, the accuracy rate for these lucky duckies is just 37%.That doesn’t mean that only 37% of income is reported, only that just 37% of reports are accurate. The majority of these people report income, just not all of it.Within this system where cheating predominates, there is a black hole of income that it is especially hard to detect. That hole is real estate, especially closely held real estate partnership income.Avoiding DetectionUnder rules set by Congress the real estate family that cheats together is unlikely to get caught, as Jerry Curnutt, the retired IRS partnerships specialist, figured out two decades ago and I have reported on again, and again and again and again.Our government takes little interest in the kind of cheating the Trumps and other real estate families engage in. But it takes deep interest in the possibility of tax cheating by low-wage workers.And if they are caught, landlords can often settle for pennies on the dollar by hiring aggressive lawyers who threaten to tie up the dwindling IRS staff in court for years.The Trumps sometimes relied on the notorious Roy Cohn, the attack-dog lawyer for Sen. Joe McCarthy before Cohn became a consigliere for the Genovese and Gambino crime families and for Donald Trump.It also helps the Trumps and other real estate families that they often report negative incomes. Under rules set by Congress, if you own a lot of real estate you can legally report you made less than nothing for income tax purposes while living a lavish lifestyle.Consider an IRS auditor who finds that a real estate family reported, say, $10 million of negative income on which no tax is due but really had only $1 million of negative income. Either way, no tax is due immediately. That means the IRS auditor has no incentive to pursue that unwarranted $9 million of negative income, as some auditors have told me in vivid detail.The cheating real estate family, on the other hand, gets to carry that bogus $9 million forward until a year when they can use it to offset actual income—so it has real value to them.Cheating High and LowOur government takes little interest in the kind of cheating the Trumps and other real estate families engage in. In contrast to this, it takes an extraordinarily deep interest in the possibility of tax cheating by workers, especially low-wage workers.To illustrate this let’s review an audit released Oct. 9 by J. Russell George, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration or TIGTA. Congress created the position after 1997 and 1998 hearings on alleged IRS abuses of taxpayers. The hearings were shams, the testimony nonsense, as The Wall Street Journal, local newspapers, Tax Notes magazine and my reporting in The New York Times all showed at the time.TIGTA’s latest audit examines taxes on cash tips paid to food servers, who under a federal law signed by President Clinton can be paid just $2.13 an hour, far less than the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.Tips are often paid in cash and often go unreported for tax purposes.According to TIGTA, “the IRS estimates that 10% ($23 billion) of the estimated 2006 individual income tax underreporting Tax Gap ($235 billion) is due to unreported tip income by employees.”The amount of unreported tip income is bupkis. It’s about one-third of one percent of all wage and tip income. How much tax money are we going to collect from workers who make such little money?On the other hand, the Inspector General pays hardly any attention to high-end tax cheating. He’s never scrutinized IRS policing of hedge funds.While George, a former Republican operative, ignores the tax habits of the rich, he has an extraordinary obsession with the working poor. I searched the TIGTA website for audits and reports on the Earned Income Tax Credit, a kind of negative income tax for low-wage workers, and got this astonishing result:12,600 hits. Few of those are audits, to be sure. But no one even blanched at TIGTA when I asked about the huge number of citations about a benefit for the working poor.TIGTA officials declined to comment on the record.What about the lack of audits related to hedge funds? While there are no audit reports, they do get all of two passing mentions at the TIGTA website.And what of landlords, like the Trumps used to be when they were cheating the government? Just 11 mentions, not one of which appears to be about tax cheating and how to reduce it.=After Budget Cuts, the IRS’ Work Against Tax Cheats is Facing “Collapse”by Jesse Eisinger and Paul KielAudits and criminal referrals are down sharply since Congress cut the tax agency’s budget and management changed priorities.=Johnson & Johnson is cheating women and girls out of the chance to beat poverty.Turns out the pharmaceutical giant that has promised generations of children 'no more tears' is dodging its taxes.And it’s not the only member of the big pharma club that systematically stashes its profits in overseas tax havens. According to a new report by Oxfam International, Pfizer, Merck & Co (MSD), and Abbott are at it too. In doing so, they’re cheating governments out of millions that could be invested in public services – healthcare, education, and infrastructure.=http://www.alternet.org/economy/robert-reich-finally-someone-had-guts-take-tech-behemoth-apple-mat-and-wonhttp://www.alternet.org/economy/tax-loophiole-makes-super-rich-richerLeo Hindery Jr. remembers the call he got the night before he was to testify before Congress, in September of 2007, to close a tax loophole enjoyed by private equity investors. It was from Stephen Schwarzman, co-founder of the Blackstone Group, the largest private equity management firm in the U.S.“His opening sentence was, ‘You’re a traitor,’” remembers Hindery, himself the founder of a private equity firm, and hence a member of the brotherhood of the loophole’s beneficiaries. Hindery reminded Schwarzman that he hadn’t yet testified; it might be too soon to judge. Schwarzman wasn’t having it.“If you change my income tax rate, I just won’t do this work anymore,” Hindery remembers him saying.“Then you’ll be worth only $4 billion, instead of $6 billion?” Hindery replied. “I think that’s okay.”Actually, Schwarzman’s net worth, according to Forbes magazine, is currently closer to $10 billion, down from nearly $13 billion in 2015, when he was the 100th richest man in the world (his ranking declined this year to 113th). At least part of his success owes to a tricky part of the U.S. income tax code that Hindery has now testified against repeatedly, and before more than one legislative body. Called the “carried interest tax loophole,” it allows managers of certain funds to treat, for tax purposes, the bulk of their earnings not as remuneration for services rendered, but as long-term capital gains. The current tax rate on capital gains for earners in the higher-income tax brackets is 20 percent. The ordinary tax rate for the same ultra-wealthy class is 39.6 percent.“It’s so unfair to the middle class,” Hindery tells Capital & Main. “You adopt a progressive tax system, and then people get to abuse it.” The tax break benefits only about 2,000 people in the country, “mostly men, concentrated in a handful of states,” he says. Hindery estimates the lower tax rate saves the combined lot of them $10 billion to $12 billion every year. With that kind of money, he says, “you could fix all the municipal water problems in this entire country. It’s just a fraud.”Other estimates of the potential revenue gain from closing the loophole are lower; some run even higher. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that taxing carried interest at ordinary rates would net $18 billion over 10 years. Victor Fleischer, the law professor, now at the University of San Diego, who in 2006 published an influential paper on the carried interest tax, “Two and Twenty,” thinks even that might be low by a factor of eight. Fleischer continually revises his estimate of how much a standard tax on carried interest would generate over a decade, based on IRS income statistics. He wrote in an email that his current figure stands at $150 million.Carried interest, or “carry,” gets its name from the days when medieval ship captains demanded a 20 percent profit on the goods they carried from Europe to Asia, to compensate them for risking life and bounty braving pirate-infested and storm-tossed seas. Though the metaphor has stuck, the risk to the modern fund manager isn’t nearly so extreme; in fact, it’s hardly a risk at all. Private equity firms make only miniscule contributions to their investment schemes; the rest they raise from “limited partners,” such as retirement funds and other fiduciaries. Those partners pay an annual management fee of two percent on the capital investment, and a 20 percent “carry” on any profits the investment brings in.When the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), for instance, commits $500 million to a Blackstone Group-managed fund (as it has), Blackstone earns a $10 million annual fee, which is generally taxed at the regular rate. If that investment doubles in value, $100 million goes to the firm, and the remaining $400 million to CalPERS. The tax code treats that $100 million as a capital gain, subject to a 20 percent tax rate.Hindery, founder of the private equity firm InterMedia, has long been an advocate of labor and economic policies that benefit the middle class. But he’s not the only one in his elite set arguing to alter the tax code to his own detriment. He belongs to a group called “Patriotic Millionaires,” led by Morris Pearl, until 2014 the managing director of the investment-management firm BlackRock. Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett actually complained that his 17.4 percent tax rate was too low. “My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress,” he wrote. “It’s time for our government to get real about shared sacrifice.” It was the carried interest problem President Obama was referring to in the 2012 presidential campaign when he noted that the billionaire “Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.”Schwarzman, who personally collected $88.3 million in carried interest last year, did not respond to Capital & Main’s request for comment, but a lobbyist connected with him, Wayne Berman, has argued that a carried interest tax hike would punish innovators, and drag down the entire economy. Schwarzman himself likened the push to extract more tax revenue from billionaires to Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland. He has since apologized.Last summer, Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Representative Sander Levin (D-MI), introduced identical bills in their respective bodies, both called the “Carried Interest Fairness Act of 2015.” Their combined efforts, both currently held up in committee, mark the second attempt Congress has made to address the issue since Fleischer’s research brought the issue to the Senate Finance Committee’s attention. (Fleischer’s paper, coincidentally, made the news around the same time Schwarzman allegedly threw himself a $5 million birthday party with Rod Stewart as headline entertainment).Alec MacGillis has written in detail for the New Yorker about the saga of the legislation Levin first proposed, and its Senate counterpart by then-Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) and Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA). The bills have either been held up in committee, stalled in the Republican-dominated Senate, or run into cloaked resistance from Senate Democrats, including New York Senator Charles Schumer. Hindery traces it all back to one simple fact: “Campaign finance abuse,” from which the Democratic Party “is not immune.” Since 2007, private equity and investment firms have sunk anywhere from $8 million to $16 million into their lobbying efforts each year.“You get what you pay for in this country,” he says.Nevertheless, there might be more hope for Levin and Baldwin’s efforts this year, in part because of increasing voter awareness of the mechanisms of inequality. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in his presidential campaign vowed to pay for a jobs program for disadvantaged youth by closing the carried interest loophole; Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has included the billionaire tax break in her overall message about Wall Street reform.Hillary Clinton, who did not sign on as a co-sponsor to the Baucus-Grassley bill as a Senator in 2007, now says that she would consider using executive authority over the Treasury Department to impose the full tax rate on fund managers’ earnings. Even Donald Trump has come out against the carried interest loophole. (But he alsowants to lower taxes so dramatically that the issue would be moot.)If a national effort fails, Hindery tells Capital & Main, Patriotic Millionaires will take the matter to the states. The New York legislature already has a bill in the works to impose a surtax on people who benefit from the federal loophole. In California, where capital gains are already taxed as ordinary income, legislators may be considering a similar proposal. “No one disputes that thoughtful investment is good for the country,” Hindery says. “But if you don’t shut this door, I don’t know how you get the middle class in this country to ever trust Washington again.” https://www.propublica.org/article/how-david-rubenstein-helped-save-the-carried-interest-tax-loopholeThe Patriot: How Philanthropist David Rubenstein Helped Save a Tax Break Billionaires Love A private equity mogul lauded for his patriotic donations has quietly worked to protect one source of his wealth — the carried-interest loophole.by Alec MacGillis, ProPublica March 7, 2016 This story was co-published with The New Yorker.  On Aug. 23, 2011, a magnitude-5.8 earthquake shook the Washington Monument for about 20 seconds, sending tourists on the observation deck down eight hundred and ninety-seven steps. One of the two strongest quakes ever recorded east of the Rockies, it fractured two dozen of the stone protrusions that hold up the marble slabs at the monument’s peak. That December, Congress appropriated half of the $15 million required to repair the obelisk, saying that the rest would have to be raised from private citizens. The Breakdown  How politics and government really work, and why they don’t.  See the full series.  Within weeks, David Rubenstein, the co-founder of the Carlyle Group, a private-equity firm, announced that he would provide the funds. On June 2, 2013, Rubenstein joined the Secretary of the Interior and the head of the National Park Service to inspect the progress, atop the scaffolding. In public appearances, he often tells what happened next, in a deadpan manner that he says is joking. As he recalled last year in a talk at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he decided, while his hosts were looking away, to leave his mark: “I took a pen out and I wrote my initials at the very top.”  Rubenstein, with an estimated net worth of $2.6 billion, is one of the wealthiest people in Washington. He is an American-history buff, and practices what he calls “patriotic philanthropy,” on behalf of the national heritage. In 2007, he spent $21.3 million on a 710-year-old copy of the Magna Carta. He loaned it to the National Archives and, four years later, financed the construction of a new, $13.5 million gallery to house the document. He has bought two copies of the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by Abraham Lincoln, and loaned one to President Obama, who displayed it for a time in the Oval Office. He has made substantial gifts to Monticello, to James Madison’s estate at Montpelier, to Robert E. Lee’s mansion, to the Iwo Jima Memorial, and, last month, to the Lincoln Memorial. (Although he has also donated generously to hospitals, universities, and other traditional beneficiaries, more than half of the several hundred million dollars he has given away fits the “patriotic” theme.)  His role as a civic patriarch extends to other projects. He is the president of the Economic Club of Washington, which brings together the city’s business élite for discussions with government and financial leaders, and he sits on the boards of the Kennedy Center, the Brookings Institution, and the Smithsonian. Every few months, he funds a bipartisan dinner salon for senators and representatives at the Library of Congress, where he interviews a prominent presidential historian, such as David McCullough, Ron Chernow, or Doris Kearns Goodwin. David Rubenstein views the 715-year-old copy of the Magna Carta he bought and gave on longterm loan to the National Archives in Washington. (Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images)  In 1987, after a short career in politics, Rubenstein founded Carlyle, building it around his Washington relationships and those of his partners — “access capitalism,” Michael Lewis called it, in a critical 1993 profile of Rubenstein in The New Republic. For the most part, Rubenstein has received favorable press coverage, including widespread praise for his charitable work. In 2012, the Washington Post described him as the “generous repeat benefactor for Washington’s endangered national icons,” and the magazine Washingtonian named him a Washingtonian of the Year. He is a frequent guest on Bloomberg Television and on CNBC. Last May, on a “60 Minutes” segment titled “All-American,” he said, referring to the Washington Monument, “The government doesn’t have the resources it used to have. We have gigantic budget deficits and large debt. And I think private citizens now need to pitch in.”  Until recently, relatively little attention had been paid to one source of Rubenstein’s wealth, which he has quietly fought to protect: the so-called carried-interest tax loophole. The tax break has helped private equity become one of the most lucrative sectors of the financial industry. Since the end of the recession, private equity has reported record profits, and at least eighteen private-equity executives are estimated to be worth $2 billion or more each. And during the current presidential campaign, with its populist themes, the loophole has become a target among Democrats and Republicans alike.  The notion of “carried interest” derives from the share of profits that twelfth-century ship captains received on the cargo they carried. It came into its modern usage in the 1920s, in the oil-and-gas industry, and was enshrined in the federal tax code in 1954. When a group of partners drilled for oil, a few would put up the money and others would invest only their labor, or “sweat equity” — finding land and investors, buying equipment, and so on. If the partners sold out, the IRS would tax the profits of all the partners at the lower rate for capital gains rather than as ordinary income.  Over time, partnerships in other industries, mainly real estate and venture capital, began taking advantage of the same form of taxation. Private-equity firms stretched the model to its breaking point. Their work is essentially a combination of investment banking and management consulting: they are compensated not for building new ventures from scratch, with the risk that entails, but for managing the investments of wealthy individuals and pension funds and other institutional clients. These funds are pooled, along ?with borrowed money, to acquire private companies or to take public companies private — before making improvements or cutting costs and selling at a big profit.  Even if no profits are realized, private-equity firms get paid: under the “2 and 20” compensation structure, they receive a two percent fee annually on assets under management, in addition to a 20 percent cut of profits beyond a given benchmark. The IRS characterizes the managers’ cut of the profits as carried interest, taxing it as though it were capital gains made through the sale of a person’s own investment. For most of the past fifteen years, long-term capital gains have been taxed at 15 percent, compared with 35 percent for ordinary income in the top bracket.  One name for the tax break is the “hedge-fund loophole,” but hedge funds benefit much less than private equity does, because their trades tend to be too short-term to qualify for the low capital-gains rate. At a Credit Suisse forum in Miami, in 2013, Rubenstein said of private equity, “Carried interest is really what the business has historically been about — producing distributions for your investors from good sales and IPOs … and getting 20 percent of the profits for yourself.” He went on, “That’s how we’ve really grown our business.”  Barack Obama, during his first presidential campaign, pledged to reform the tax on carried interest and, in 2012, went after Mitt Romney for having enjoyed its benefits as the co-founder of Bain Capital. This year, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump have all attacked the loophole, often using hedge-fund managers as the rhetorical target. As Trump put it in August, “They’re paying nothing, and it’s ridiculous. … These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.” Jeb Bush, who made a foray into private equity in 2014, also called for closing the loophole during his ill-fated campaign. Private-equity partners argue that their tax treatment is justified under the tradition of encouraging risky business partnerships and is necessary for their industry to flourish. So far, the partners have won out: despite the rise of anti-Wall Street sentiment after the 2008 financial collapse, the loophole has withstood every effort at reform.... richard wolff 1/1/15 30b no taxes; MA SB propsed 1% (= 20% on INCREASE)  harvardhttp://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/business/economy/for-the-wealthiest-private-tax-system-saves-them-billions.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0 ASHINGTON — The hedge fund magnates Daniel S. Loeb, Louis Moore Bacon and Steven A. Cohen have much in common. They have managed billions of dollars in capital, earning vast fortunes. They have invested large sums in art — and millions more in political candidates. Moreover, each has exploited an esoteric tax loophole that saved them millions in taxes. The trick? Route the money to Bermuda and back. With inequality at its highest levels in nearly a century and public debate rising over whether the government should respond to it through higher taxes on the wealthy, the very richest Americans have financed a sophisticated and astonishingly effective apparatus for shielding their fortunes. Some call it the “income defense industry,” consisting of a high-priced phalanx of lawyers, estate planners, lobbyists and anti-tax activists who exploit and defend a dizzying array of tax maneuvers, virtually none of them available to taxpayers of more modest means. RELATED COVERAGE I.R.S. Cracks Down on Hedge Fund Tax StrategyJULY 8, 2015Peter Brown, co-chief executive of Renaissance Technologies, testified in front of a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday in Washington.DealBook: Hedge Fund Chief Testifies at Senate Tax-Avoidance HearingJULY 22, 2014 In recent years, this apparatus has become one of the most powerful avenues of influence for wealthy Americans of all political stripes, including Mr. Loeb and Mr. Cohen, who give heavily to Republicans, and the liberal billionaire George Soros, who has called for higher levies on the rich while at the same time using tax loopholes to bolster his own fortune. All are among a small group providing much of the early cash for the 2016 presidential campaign. Operating largely out of public view — in tax court, through arcane legislative provisions and in private negotiations with the Internal Revenue Service — the wealthy have used their influence to steadily whittle away at the government’s ability to tax them. The effect has been to create a kind of private tax system, catering to only several thousand Americans. The impact on their own fortunes has been stark. Two decades ago, when Bill Clinton was elected president, the 400 highest-earning taxpayers in America paid nearly 27 percent of their income in federal taxes, according to I.R.S. data. By 2012, when President Obama was re-elected, that figure had fallen to less than 17 percent, which is just slightly more than the typical family making $100,000 annually, when payroll taxes are included for both groups. The ultra-wealthy “literally pay millions of dollars for these services,” said Jeffrey A. Winters, a political scientist at Northwestern University who studies economic elites, “and save in the tens or hundreds of millions in taxes.” Some of the biggest current tax battles are being waged by some of the most generous supporters of 2016 candidates. They include the families of the hedge fund investors Robert Mercer, who gives to Republicans, and James Simons, who gives to Democrats; as well as the options trader Jeffrey Yass, a libertarian-leaning donor to Republicans. Mr. Yass’s firm is litigating what the agency deemed to be tens of millions of dollars in underpaid taxes. Renaissance Technologies, the hedge fund Mr. Simons founded and which Mr. Mercer helps run, is currently under review by the I.R.S. over a loophole that saved their fund an estimated $6.8 billion in taxes over roughly a decade, according to a Senate investigation. Some of these same families have also contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to conservative groups that have attacked virtually any effort to raises taxes on the wealthy. For the Richest, Lower TaxesThe average tax rate for the ultra-wealthy has fallen dramatically. Income Tax Rate%201001995200020052012Top 400 earners Note: 2012 is the last year for which final data is available.  In the heat of the presidential race, the influence of wealthy donors is being tested. At stake is the Obama administration’s 2013 tax increase on high earners — the first substantial increase in two decades — and an I.R.S. initiative to ensure that, in effect, the higher rates stick by cracking down on tax avoidance by the wealthy. While Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have pledged to raise taxes on these voters, virtually every Republican has advanced policies that would vastly reduce their tax bills, sometimes to as little as 10 percent of their income. At the same time, most Republican candidates favor eliminating the inheritance tax, a move that would allow the new rich, and the old, to bequeath their fortunes intact, solidifying the wealth gap far into the future. And several have proposed a substantial reduction — or even elimination — in the already deeply discounted tax rates on investment gains, a foundation of the most lucrative tax strategies. “There’s this notion that the wealthy use their money to buy politicians; more accurately, it’s that they can buy policy, and specifically, tax policy,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who served as chief economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “That’s why these egregious loopholes exist, and why it’s so hard to close them.” The Family Office Each of the top 400 earners took home, on average, about $336 million in 2012, the latest year for which data is available. If the bulk of that money had been paid out as salary or wages, as it is for the typical American, the tax obligations of those wealthy taxpayers could have more than doubled. Instead, much of their income came from convoluted partnerships and high-end investment funds. Other earnings accrued in opaque family trusts and foreign shell corporations, beyond the reach of the tax authorities. The well-paid technicians who devise these arrangements toil away at white-shoe law firms and elite investment banks, as well as a variety of obscure boutiques. But at the fulcrum of the strategizing over how to minimize taxes are so-called family offices, the customized wealth management departments of Americans with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in assets. Family offices have existed since the late 19th century, when the Rockefellers pioneered the institution, and gained popularity in the 1980s. But they have proliferated rapidly over the last decade, as the ranks of the super-rich, and the size of their fortunes, swelled to record proportions. “We have so much wealth being created, significant wealth, that it creates a need for the family office structure now,” said Sree Arimilli, an industry recruiting consultant. Family offices, many of which are dedicated to managing and protecting the wealth of a single family, oversee everything from investment strategy to philanthropy. But tax planning is a core function. While the specific techniques these advisers employ to minimize taxes can be mind-numbingly complex, they generally follow a few simple principles, like converting one type of income into another type that’s taxed at a lower rate. Mr. Loeb, for example, has invested in a Bermuda-based reinsurer — an insurer to insurance companies — that turns around and invests the money in his hedge fund. That maneuver transforms his profits from short-term bets in the market, which the government taxes at roughly 40 percent, into long-term profits, known as capital gains, which are taxed at roughly half that rate. It has had the added advantage of letting Mr. Loeb defer taxes on this income indefinitely, allowing his wealth to compound and grow more quickly. The Bermuda insurer Mr. Loeb helped set up went public in 2013 and is active in the insurance business, not merely a tax dodge. Mr. Cohen and Mr. Bacon abandoned similar insurance-based strategies in recent years. “Our investment in Max Re was not a tax-driven scheme, but rather a sound investment response to investor interest in a more dynamically managed portfolio akin to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway,” said Mr. Bacon, who leads Moore Capital Management. “Hedge funds were a minority of the investment portfolio, and Moore Capital’s products a much smaller subset of this alternative portfolio.” Mr. Loeb and Mr. Cohen declined to comment. Photo Louis Moore Bacon, shown with his wife, Gabrielle, is the founder of a highly successful hedge fund and a leading contributor to Jeb Bush’s super PAC. Among his homes is one on Robins Island, off Long Island. Credit Left: Amanda Gordon/Bloomberg News, via Getty ImagesOrganizing one’s business as a partnership can be lucrative in its own right. Some of the partnerships from which the wealthy derive their income are allowed to sell shares to the public, making it easy to cash out a chunk of the business while retaining control. But unlike publicly traded corporations, they pay no corporate income tax; the partners pay taxes as individuals. And the income taxes are often reduced by large deductions, such as for depreciation. For large private partnerships, meanwhile, the I.R.S. often struggles “to determine whether a tax shelter exists, an abusive tax transaction is being used,” according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office. The agency is not allowed to collect underpaid taxes directly from these partnerships, even those with several hundred partners. Instead, it must collect from each individual partner, requiring the agency to commit significant time and manpower. The wealthy can also avail themselves of a range of esoteric and customized tax deductions that go far beyond writing off a home office or dinner with a client. One aggressive strategy is to place income in a type of charitable trust, generating a deduction that offsets the income tax. The trust then purchases what’s known as a private placement life insurance policy, which invests the money on a tax-free basis, frequently in a number of hedge funds. The person’s heirs can inherit, also tax-free, whatever money is left after the trust pays out a percentage each year to charity, often a considerable sum. Many of these maneuvers are well established, and wealthy taxpayers say they are well within their rights to exploit them. Others exist in a legal gray area, its boundaries defined by the willingness of taxpayers to defend their strategies against the I.R.S. Almost all are outside the price range of the average taxpayer. Among tax lawyers and accountants, “the best and brightest get a high from figuring out how to do tricky little deals,” said Karen L. Hawkins, who until recently headed the I.R.S. office that oversees tax practitioners. “Frankly, it is almost beyond the intellectual and resource capacity of the Internal Revenue Service to catch.” The combination of cost and complexity has had a profound effect, tax experts said. Whatever tax rates Congress sets, the actual rates paid by the ultra-wealthy tend to fall over time as they exploit their numerous advantages. From Mr. Obama’s inauguration through the end of 2012, federal income tax rates on individuals did not change (excluding payroll taxes). But the highest-earning one-thousandth of Americans went from paying an average of 20.9 percent to 17.6 percent. By contrast, the top 1 percent, excluding the very wealthy, went from paying just under 24 percent on average to just over that level. “We do have two different tax systems, one for normal wage-earners and another for those who can afford sophisticated tax advice,” said Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the University of San Diego who studies the intersection of tax policy and inequality. “At the very top of the income distribution, the effective rate of tax goes down, contrary to the principles of a progressive income tax system.” A Very Quiet Defense Having helped foster an alternative tax system, wealthy Americans have been aggressive in defending it. Trade groups representing the Bermuda-based insurance company Mr. Loeb helped set up, for example, have spent the last several months pleading with the I.R.S. that its proposed rules tightening the hedge fund insurance loophole are too onerous. The major industry group representing private equity funds spends hundreds of thousands of dollars each year lobbying on such issues as “carried interest,” the granddaddy of Wall Street tax loopholes, which makes it possible for fund managers to pay the capital gains rate rather than the higher standard tax rate on a substantial share of their income for running the fund. The budget deal that Congress approved in October allows the I.R.S. to collect underpaid taxes from large partnerships at the firm level for the first time — which is far easier for the agency — thanks to a provision that lawmakers slipped into the deal at the last minute, before many lobbyists could mobilize. But the new rules are relatively weak — firms can still choose to have partners pay the taxes — and don’t take effect until 2018, giving the wealthy plenty of time to weaken them further. Shortly after the provision passed, the Managed Funds Association, an industry group that represents prominent hedge funds like D. E. Shaw, Renaissance Technologies, Tiger Management and Third Point, began meeting with members of Congress to discuss a wish list of adjustments. The founders of these funds have all donated at least $500,000 to 2016 presidential candidates. During the Obama presidency, the association itself has risen to become one of the most powerful trade groups in Washington, spending over $4 million a year on lobbying. --- Buying PowerArticles in this series examine America’s growing concentration of wealth and its consequences for government and politics. THE ELITE DONORSThe Families Funding the 2016 Presidential ElectionOCT. 10, 2015 THE AGENDAA Wealthy Governor and His Friends Are Remaking IllinoisNOV. 29, 2015 THE BIG BETInside the Billion-Dollar Battle for Puerto Rico’s FutureDEC. 19, 2015Advertisement Continue reading the main story And while the lobbying clout of the wealthy is most often deployed through industry trade associations and lawyers, some rich families have locked arms to advance their interests more directly. The inheritance tax has been a primary target. In the early 1990s, a California family office executive named Patricia Soldano began lobbying on behalf of wealthy families to repeal the tax, which would not only save them money, but also make it easier to preserve their business empires from one generation to the next. The idea struck many hardened operatives as unrealistic at the time, given that the tax affected only the wealthiest Americans. But Ms. Soldano’s efforts — funded in part by the Mars and Koch families — laid the groundwork for a one-year elimination in 2010. The tax has been restored, but currently applies only to couples leaving roughly $11 million or more to their heirs, up from those leaving more than $1.2 million when Ms. Soldano started her campaign. It affected fewer than 5,200 families last year. “If anyone would have told me we’d be where we are today, I would never have guessed it,” Ms. Soldano said in an interview. Some of the most profound victories are barely known outside the insular world of the wealthy and their financial managers. In 2009, Congress set out to require that investment partnerships like hedge funds register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, partly so that regulators would have a better grasp on the risks they posed to the financial system. The early legislative language would have required single-family offices to register as well, exposing the highly secretive institutions to scrutiny that their clients were eager to avoid. Some of the I.R.S.’s cases against the wealthy originate with tips from the S.E.C., which is often better positioned to spot tax evasion. By the summer of 2009, several family office executives had formed a lobbying group called the Private Investor Coalition to push back against the proposal. The coalition won an exemption in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, then spent much of the next year persuading the S.E.C. to largely adopt its preferred definition of “family office.” So expansive was the resulting loophole that Mr. Soros’s $24.5 billion hedge fund took advantage of it, converting to a family office after returning capital to its remaining outside investors. The hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller, a former business partner of Mr. Soros, took the same step. The Soros family, which generally supports Democrats, has committed at least $1 million to the 2016 presidential campaign; Mr. Druckenmiller, who favors Republicans, has put slightly more than $300,000 behind three different G.O.P. presidential candidates. A slide presentation from the Private Investor Coalition’s 2013 annual meeting credited the success to multiple meetings with members of the Senate Banking Committee, the House Financial Services Committee, congressional staff and S.E.C. staff. “All with a low profile,” the document noted. “We got most of what we wanted AND a few extras we didn’t request.” A Hobbled Monitor After all the loopholes and all the lobbying, what remains of the government’s ability to collect taxes from the wealthy runs up against one final hurdle: the crisis facing the I.R.S. President Obama has made fighting tax evasion by the rich a priority. In 2010, he signed legislation making it easier to identify Americans who squirreled away assets in Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Islands shelters. His I.R.S. convened a Global High Wealth Industry Group, known colloquially as “the wealth squad,” to scrutinize the returns of Americans with incomes of at least $10 million a year. But while these measures have helped the government retrieve billions, the agency’s efforts have flagged in the face of scandal, political pressure and budget cuts. Between 2010, the year before Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, and 2014, the I.R.S. budget dropped by almost $2 billion in real terms, or nearly 15 percent. That has forced it to shed about 5,000 high-level enforcement positions out of about 23,000, according to the agency. Audit rates for the $10 million-plus club spiked in the first few years of the Global High Wealth program, but have plummeted since then. Steven A. Cohen, shown with his wife, Alexandra, is the founder of SAC Capital and owns a home in East Hampton. He is a prominent art collector and has focused his political contributions on a super PAC for Gov. Chris Christie. Credit Left: Carly Erickson/BFA; Right: Doug Kuntz for The New York TimesThe political challenge for the agency became especially acute in 2013, after the agency acknowledged singling out conservative nonprofits in a review of political activity by tax-exempt groups. (Senior officials left the agency as a result of the controversy.) Several former I.R.S. officials, including Marcus Owens, who once headed the agency’s Exempt Organizations division, said the controversy badly damaged the agency’s willingness to investigate other taxpayers, even outside the exempt division. “I.R.S. enforcement is either absent or diminished” in certain areas, he said. Mr. Owens added that his former department — which provides some oversight of money used by charities and nonprofits — has been decimated. Groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Tax Reform, which are financed partly by the foundations of wealthy families and large businesses, have called for impeaching the I.R.S. commissioner. They are bolstered by deep-pocketed advocacy groups like the Club for Growth, which has aided primary challenges against Republicans who have voted in favor of higher taxes. In 2014, the Club for Growth Action fund raised more than $9 million and spent much of it helping candidates critical of the I.R.S. Roughly 60 percent of the money raised by the fund came from just 12 donors, including Mr. Mercer, who has given the group $2 million in the last five years. Mr. Mercer and his immediate family have also donated more than $11 million to several super PACs supporting Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, an outspoken I.R.S. critic and a presidential candidate. Another prominent donor is Mr. Yass, who helps run a trading firm called the Susquehanna International Group. He donated $100,000 to the Club for Growth Action fund in September. Mr. Yass serves on the board of the libertarian Cato Institute and, like Mr. Mercer, appears to subscribe to limited-government views that partly motivate his political spending. But he may also have more than a passing interest in creating a political environment that undermines the I.R.S. Susquehanna is currently challenging a proposed I.R.S. determination that an affiliate of the firm effectively repatriated more than $375 million in income from subsidiaries located in Ireland and the Cayman Islands in 2007, creating a large tax liability. (The affiliate brought the money back to the United States in later years and paid dividend taxes on it; the I.R.S. asserts that it should have paid the ordinary income tax rate, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars more.) In June, Mr. Yass donated more than $2 million to three super PACs aligned with Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has called for taxing all income at a flat rate of 14.5 percent. That change in itself would save wealthy supporters like Mr. Yass millions of dollars. Mr. Paul, also a presidential candididate, has suggested going even further, calling the I.R.S. a “rogue agency” and circulating a petition in 2013 calling for the tax equivalent of regime change. “Be it now therefore resolved,” the petition reads, “that we, the undersigned, demand the immediate abolishment of the Internal Revenue Service.” But even if that campaign is a long shot, the richest taxpayers will continue to enjoy advantages over everyone else. For the ultra-wealthy, “our tax code is like a leaky barrel,” said J. Todd Metcalf, the Democrats’ chief tax counsel on the Senate Finance Committee. ”Unless you plug every hole or get a new barrel, it’s going to leak out.” Nicholas Confessore contributed reporting and Kitty Bennett contributed research.---pfizer NJ allergan scam irish allergan tax haven, allready offshores profits; 40 min david k johnston syracuse law aljazeera amhttps://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-november-25-2015/apple test congr "stateless income"2004 b 43 save 11b$ in taxes Ensignsingle line of tax code signed into law by RR; keep taxes while techinvally offshore, but they can do whatever they want incl reinvest it in US, but make more off compund interest than tax, so bassically make $ on taxes duopoly can be  worse than mono; mkt power, raise prices 1b$ per WEEK of we could negotiate (Vets Admin can)3 airlines plus SW; ==tax haven wikiExtent[edit]Global distribution of net financial assets[17] Individuals with financial assetsTotal liquid net worth ($Tr.)Amount of which offshore ($Tr.)> $30MM$16.7$9.8$5 – $30MM$10.7$5.1$1 – $5MM$17.4$4.7All > $1MM$44.8$19.6Rest < $1MM$10.3$1.0 Total$55.1$20.6 Capital held offshore[edit]While incomplete, and with the limitations discussed below, the available statistics nonetheless indicate that offshore banking is a very sizable activity. The OECDestimated in 2007 that capital held offshore amounted to between $5 trillion and $7 trillion, making up approximately 6–8% of total global investments under management.[18] The Tax Justice Network (an anti-tax haven pressure group) estimated more recently in 2012 that capital held offshore amounted to between $21 trillion and $32 trillion (between 24-32% of total global investments).[19][20][21]In 2000, the International Monetary Fund calculated based on Bank for International Settlements data that for selected offshore financial centres, on-balance sheet cross-border assets held in offshore financial centres reached a level of $4.6 trillion at the end of June 1999 (about 50 percent of total cross-border assets). Of that $4.6 trillion, $0.9 trillion was held in the Caribbean, $1 trillion in Asia, and most of the remaining $2.7 trillion accounted for by the major International Finance Centres (IFCs), namely London, the U.S. IBFs, and the Japanese offshore market.[22] The U.S. Department of Treasury estimated that in 2011 the Caribbean Banking Centers, which include Bahamas, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Netherlands Antilles and Panama, held almost $2 trillion dollars in United States debt.[23] Of this, approximately US$1.4 trillion is estimated to be held in the Cayman Islands alone.[18]The Wall Street Journal in a study of 60 large U.S. companies found that they deposited $166 billion in offshore accounts in 2012, sheltering over 40% of their profits from U.S. taxes.[12] Similarly, Desai, Foley and Hines in the Journal of Public Economics found that: "in 1999, 59% of U.S. firms with significant foreign operations had affiliates in tax haven countries", although they did not define "significant" for this purpose.[24] In 2009, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that 83 of the 100 largest U.S. publicly traded corporations and 63 of the 100 largest contractors for the U.S. federal government were maintaining subsidiaries in countries generally considered havens for avoiding taxes. The GAO did not review the companies' transactions to independently verify that the subsidiaries helped the companies reduce their tax burden, but said only that historically the purpose of such subsidiaries is to cut tax costs.[25]James Henry, former chief economist at consultants McKinsey & Company, in his report for the Tax Justice Network gives an indication of the amount of money that is sheltered by wealthy individuals in tax havens. The report estimated conservatively that a fortune of $21 trillion is stashed away in off-shore accounts with $9.8 trillion alone by the top tier—less than 100,000 people—who each own financial assets of $30 million or more. The report's author indicated that this hidden money results in a “huge” lost tax revenue—a "black hole" in the economy—and many countries would become creditors instead of being debtors if the money of their tax evaders would be taxed.[19][20][21]Lost tax revenue[edit]The Tax Justice Network estimated that global tax revenue lost in 2012 to tax havens is between USD $190 billion and $255 billion per year, assuming a 3% capital gains rate, a 30% capital gains tax rate, and $21 trillion to $32 trillion hidden in tax havens worldwide.[8] If such hidden offshore assets are considered, many countries with governments nominally in debt are shown to be net creditor nations.[9] However, the tax policy director of the Chartered Institute of Taxation expressed skepticism over the accuracy of the figures.[11] If true, those sums would amount to approximately 5 to 8 times the total amount of currency presently in circulation in the world. Daniel J. Mitchell of the Cato Institute says that the report also assumes, when considering notional lost tax revenue, that 100% money deposited offshore is evading payment of tax.[26]In October 2009, research commissioned from Deloitte for the Foot Review of British Offshore Financial Centres (London is a tax haven for much of Europe, Asia, and South America, it should be noted) said that much less tax had been lost to tax havens than previously had been thought. The report indicated "We estimate the total UK corporation tax potentially lost to avoidance activities to be up to £2 billion per annum, although it could be much lower." An earlier report by the U.K. Trades Union Congress, concluded that tax avoidance by the 50 largest companies in the FTSE 100 was depriving the UK Treasury of approximately £11.8 billion.[27] The report also stressed that British Crown Dependencies make a "significant contribution to the liquidity of the UK market". In the second quarter of 2009, they provided net funds to banks in the UK totalling $323 billion (£195 billion), of which $218 billion came from Jersey, $74 billion from Guernsey and $40 billion from the Isle of Man.[27]The Tax Justice Network reports that this system of tax evasion is “basically designed and operated” by a group of highly paid specialists from the world’s largest private banks (led by UBS, Credit Suisse, andGoldman Sachs), law offices, and accounting firms and tolerated by international organizations such as Bank for International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the OECD, and the G20. The amount of money hidden away has significantly increased since 2005, sharpening the divide between the super-rich and the rest of the world.[19][20][21]Examples[edit]See also: List of offshore financial centres and Tax rates around the worldThe U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research has suggested that roughly 15% of the countries in the world are tax havens, that these countries tend to be small and affluent, and that better governed and regulated countries are more likely to become tax havens, and are more likely to be successful if they become tax havens.[28]</font></p>

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