Billionaires don’t pay tax

Leona Helmsley was an unrecognized genius.

When Clinton accused Trump of paying no federal taxes, he didn’t deny it — rather, he said, “That makes me smart.”

He wasn’t the first rich sociopath to make that claim. Remember when Leona Helmsley told the press “only little people pay taxes?”

https://apicciano.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2020/09/28/remembering-leona-helmsley-the-queen-of-mean-only-the-little-people-pay-taxes-we-have-donald-trump-the-don-of-con/

Today, Propublica published the first in a series of blockbuster analyses of leaked tax data from America’s richest billionaires — some of whom have lobbies for higher taxes on the rich! — showing that the true tax rate for billionaires is 3.4%.

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax

These records — which include tax data for Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Carl Icahn and others — reveal that it’s not just sneering boasters like Trump and Helmsley who avoid the tax the rest of us pay — it’s the whole cohort.

Much has been made of the “K-shaped” recovery from the pandemic-driven economic collapse, where the rich got richer and the poor got…