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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?”
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%.
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 poorer, but when it comes to the 0.001%, this is far more pronounced. America’s billionaires got $1.2 trillion richer during the pandemic.
Much of this wealth accumulation is due to the fact that poor people pay high taxes, while rich people pay low taxes. A household earning $70k pays about 14% in federal tax; In 2019, Michael Bloomberg made $2B and paid 1.3% of it in federal tax.
All this wealth-accumulation creates family dynasties, meaning that the rich stay rich, and the poor stay poor, and the only real social mobility is downward, as the middle class loses ground and slips down the ladder.
https://doctorow.medium.com/the-rents-too-damned-high-520f958d5ec5
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