<
https://doctorow.medium.com/retiring-the-us-debt-would-retire-the-us-dollar-30f366e0bc40>
"One of the most consequential series of investigative journalism of this
decade was the
Propublica series that Jesse Eisinger helmed, in which
Eisinger and colleagues analyzed a trove of leaked IRS tax returns for the
richest people in America:
https://www.propublica.org/series/the-secret-irs-files
The
Secret IRS Files revealed the fact that many of America’s oligarchs pay
no tax at all. Some of them even get subsidies intended for poor families, like
Jeff Bezos, whose tax affairs are so scammy that he was able to claim to be
among the working poor and receive a federal Child Tax Credit, a $4,000 gift
from the American public to one of the richest men who ever lived:
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax
As important as the numbers revealed by the
Secret IRS Files were, I found
the
explanations even more interesting. The 99.9999% of us who never make
contact with the secretive elite wealth management and tax cheating industry
know, in the abstract, that there’s
something scammy going on in those
esoteric cults of wealth accumulation, but we’re pretty vague on the details.
When I pondered the “tax loopholes” that the rich were exploiting, I pictured,
you know, long lists of equations salted with Greek symbols, completely beyond
my ken.
But when
Propublica’s series laid these secret tactics out, I learned that
they were incredibly
stupid ruses, tricks so thin that the only way they
could
possibly fool the IRS is if the IRS just didn’t give a shit (and they
truly didn’t — after decades of cuts and attacks, the IRS was far more likely
to audit a family earning less than $30k/year than a billionaire)."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
