That Tax Shelter Is The Great Hall Of Thrain

Why yes, the nation's richest Americans are also the nation's biggest tax scofflaws, like Smaug sitting on his hoard, and if they actually paid what the law says they owe, we'd more than be able to afford the Biden infrastructure package twice over.

 

The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans are the nation’s most egregious tax evaders, failing to pay as much as $163 billion in owed taxes per year, according to a new Treasury Department report released on Wednesday.

The analysis comes as the Biden administration is pushing lawmakers to embrace its ambitious proposal to invest in beefing up the Internal Revenue Service to narrow the “tax gap,” which it estimates amounts to $7 trillion in unpaid taxes over a decade. The White House has proposed investing $80 billion in the tax collection agency over the next 10 years to hire more enforcement staff, overhaul its technology and usher in new information-reporting requirements that would give the government greater insight into tax evasion schemes.

The proposals have been met with deep skepticism from Republicans and business lobbyists who argue that the I.R.S. cannot be trusted with more power and that the proposals are an invasion of privacy. Democrats are counting on raising money by collecting more unpaid taxes to help pay for the $3.5 trillion spending package they are in the process of drafting. The Treasury Department estimates that its tax gap proposals could raise $700 billion over a decade.

The Treasury Department report, which was written by Natasha Sarin, deputy assistant secretary for microeconomics, makes the case that narrowing the tax gap is part of the Biden administration’s ambition to create a more equitable economy, as audits and enforcement actions will be aimed at the rich.

“For the I.R.S. to appropriately enforce the tax laws against high earners and large corporations, it needs funding to hire and train revenue agents who can decipher their thousands of pages of sophisticated tax filings,” Ms. Sarin wrote. “It also needs access to information about opaque income streams — like proprietorship and partnership income — that accrue disproportionately to high-earners.”

 

Let's not forget that the GOP did everything it could to cut taxes on the top 1% when Trump took office and then they turned around and raised taxes on the rest of us so that taxes on the 1% could be lowered even more.

 

The GOP knows who their constituency is, and it's the wealthiest Americans and the corporations they own to profit and give money to the GOP in turn.

Biden's trying to fix that. Remember that too.