https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57383869 Details claiming to reveal how little income tax US billionaires pay have been leaked to a news website. ProPublica says it has seen the tax returns of some of the world's richest people, including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett. The website alleges Amazon's Mr Bezos paid no tax in 2007 and 2011, while Tesla's Mr Musk paid nothing in 2018. A White House spokeswoman called the leak "illegal", and the FBI and tax authorities are investigating. Publica said it was analysing what it called a "vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data" on the taxes of the billionaires, and would release further details over coming weeks. While the BBC has not been able to confirm the claims, the alleged leak comes at a time of growing debate about the amount of tax paid by the wealthy and widening inequality. ProPublica said the richest 25 Americans pay less in tax - an average of 15.8% of adjusted gross income - than most mainstream US workers. Jesse Eisinger, senior reporter and editor at ProPublica, told the Today Programme: "We were pretty astonished that you could get [tax] down to zero if you were a multi-billionaire. Actually paying zero in tax really floored us. Ultra-wealthy people can sidestep the system in an entirely legal way." They have enormous ability to find deductions, find credits and exploit loopholes in the system," he said. So while the value of their wealth grows enormously through their ownership of shares in their company, that's not recorded as income. But there's more than that, he said: "They also take aggressive tax deductions, often because they have borrowed to fund their lifestyle." He said US billionaires buy an asset, build one or inherit a fortune, and then borrow against their wealth. Because they don't realise any gains or sell any stock, they're not taking any income, which could be taxed. "They then borrow from a bank at a relatively low interest rate, live off that and can use the interest expenses as deductions on their income," he said.
Let them get away with? Congress writes the tax code..... When things are intentionally complicated then a bunch of crookedness is going on. The tax law and gun laws are intentionally complex and patched worked in order to abuse it.
Probably for the same reasons some CEO’s get paid a whole $1 in salary a year. Then things like marginal tax rate don’t matter and you can capital gains etc tax
Hence why we need to make capital gains have a far more aggressive rate for a new bracket over 1 million.
Wow fckers up placement word I did I have to stop altering my texts mid-sentence without word checking
Scranton Joe will most definitely effect the return to the alternative minimum tax, which was terminated by the soon-to-be indicted DJ Trump
Yes, before they lose their heads like has happened in every other instance where this disparity happened. We need unions to come back strong. DD
Rich people have volatile taxes due to capital gains and losses. There are lots of ways to delay or shift taxes between years - many fewer ways to just avoid them entirely. Picking out 1 or 2 years is meaningless - it would be far more useful to look at a 5 or ideally 10 year span to have any useful data here.
