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millionaires
Democrats' IRS Crackdown on Millionaires Draws in $1 Billion
"This is what happens when you fund the IRS," said one tax fairness group. "Anyone trying to cut IRS funding just wants to protect rich tax cheats."
Jul 11, 2024
As the U.S. Internal Revenue Service announced Thursday that it had recovered $1 billion in unpaid taxes from wealthy individuals, economic justice advocates said the news served as a reminder of a top priority for the Republican Party: ensuring that tax evasion can continue among the richest Americans.
The IRS was able to recover the tax payments "thanks to historic funding from Democrats," said Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.). "Every single Republican in Congress voted against it and Republicans are hellbent on helping millionaires [to] keep stealing from you."
The Biden administration and Democrats in Congress pushed for the inclusion of $80 billion for the IRS in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022, with the money earmarked to allow the agency to hire more tax evasion enforcement staff and hold wealthy people and corporations accountable for tax avoidance.
When former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) took the gavel last year, he said a proposal to repeal the funding would be the "very first bill" introduced by the party, claiming the Democrats aimed to force working Americans to pay more in taxes.
The GOP managed to repeal $20 billion of the funding as part of a deal to suspend the debt ceiling in May 2023.
"Our message for these taxpayers is that now that we are resourced, we can do the job of ensuring that they pay."
Stopping the IRS from cracking down on wealthy tax cheats, said Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy for the Center for American Progress, "is THE biggest GOP priority."
Under former Republican President Donald Trump's administration, an analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) showed last year, the IRS audited low-income Americans at a higher rate than millionaires for the first time.
The IRS said the new funding allowed it to track down and contact 1,600 taxpayers with more than $1 million of income who owed more than $250,000 in tax debt.
"Our message for these taxpayers is that now that we are resourced, we can do the job of ensuring that they pay," said IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel.
Last month the IRS proposed a rule to stop "partnership basis shifting," which allows a business or individual to move assets to avoid paying taxes. The rule could recover more than $50 billion in revenue over a decade, according to the Treasury Department.
The results announced Thursday come from the agency's spending of $5.7 billion—about 10%—of its IRA funding.
"This is what happens when you fund the IRS," said ATF. "Anyone trying to cut IRS funding just wants to protect rich tax cheats."
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Meet the Secretive Rich Funding Efforts to Keep Others Poor
With both millionaires and homelessness on the rise in the U.S., right-wing donors are bankrolling a nationally coordinated move to end experiments in basic income.
Apr 03, 2024
America, a new report details, is minting millionaires at a record pace. Some 37% of the world’s millionaires, analysts at the wealth advisory firm Henley & Partners calculate, now call the United States home.
And these analysts are talking real millionaires, not those Americans who rate as “millionaires” only because they’re living in homes that have wildly appreciated in value since their purchase decades ago. Those appreciations have left typical 50-something American homeowners, the latest Federal Reserve stats show, with personal net worths a bit over $1 million.
The researchers from Henley and their partners at New World Wealth don’t count these house-rich homeowners as millionaires. They only rate as millionaires those households with over $1 million in investible assets—and the United States, their research finds, hosts far, far more of these honest-to-goodness millionaires than any other nation on Earth.
In February, lawmakers in Arizona, home to the nation’s fourth-highest homeless rate, passed a bill that bans “any program where persons are provided with regular, periodic cash payments” they can use “for any purpose.”
The numbers: Over 5.5 million Americans now hold liquid assets worth over $1 million. That total has soared 62% over the past decade, “well above,” observesCNBC analyst Robert Frank, the overall global real-millionaire increase of a mere 38%.
Rich people-friendly observers of America’s economic scene, naturally enough, see stats like these as cause for nothing but celebration. The wealthier our wealthiest become, they postulate, the more jobs—and wealth—these rich create for everyone else. A rising tide, as they like to quip, lifts all boats.
But we are, in fact, seeing no significant rising of any sort for America’s working families. We are witnessing instead stunning increases in what America’s rich are spending on themselves. One revealing recent stat: Our U.S. well-to-do, researchers at Art Basel and the banking giant UBS report, now account for 42% of global fine art sales, well above China’s 19% second-place share.
Another reflection of America’s luxury-spending dominance: The world’s top premium luxury brands—think glamorous retailers like Cartier, Bergdorf Goodman, and Gucci—all have flagship stores in Manhattan. Just this past December, the luxury powerhouse Prada announced plans to spend $835 million buying up the building that hosts its current Fifth Avenue flagship and the building next door.
For America’s poorest, meanwhile, “luxury” has come to mean keeping a roof over your head.
The number of Americans chronically homeless, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reported out this past December, has been climbing since 2016—in what Jeff Olivet, the director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, likens to a “game of really vicious musical chairs.” The United States, he explains, has “an incredible deficit of affordable housing units,” with only one unit available for every three extremely low-income renters.
And “if someone has a medical condition, a mental health disability, a substance use disorder,” Olivet adds, “it makes it all that much more complex for someone to exit homelessness.”
The solution to this growing housing squeeze? America’s most conservative lawmakers have one. Let’s simply do our best, these lawmakers are proposing, to keep our nation’s homeless out of sight.
In Florida, that approach has actually become law. Governor Ron DeSantis, fresh off his go-nowhere campaign for the GOP presidential nomination, has just signed into law legislation that makes it illegal for local municipalities to let homeless people camp or sleep on public property after this October 1.
“Florida,” DeSantis declared upon the bill’s signing, “will not allow homeless encampments to intrude on its citizens or undermine their quality of life like we see in states like New York and California.”
The new Florida law requires local governments without enough bed capacity for unhoused families to set up homeless camps far from parks and other public facilities—and the act also penalizes localities that wink at rough sleeping outside these new hidden-away camps.
Diana Stanley, a top exec in Palm Beach charity circles, considers Florida’s new approach “a statement that we’ve stopped caring about our brothers and sisters.” The main message Stanley takes from the state’s new homelessness legislation: “If we can’t see them, then we don’t have to help them.”
Florida’s latest homeless legislation, Stanley stresses, “does absolutely nothing to address the root cause of homelessness, the lack of affordable housing.” The state’s focus, agrees University of Central Florida sociologist Amy Donley, ought to be on “helping people into housing, not encampments.”
Measures that would help do just that, meanwhile, have come under intense fire from right-wing lawmakers in other states. Those lawmakers are particularly aiming that fire at state and local experiments in providing low-income families with guaranteed, no-strings basic incomes.
In Iowa, one GOP state legislator is calling such basic-income efforts “socialism on steroids.” The sponsor of another move to ban basic incomes, South Dakota’s John Wiik, is charging that basic-income plans amount to “a one-way ticket to government dependency.” In February, lawmakers in Arizona, home to the nation’s fourth-highest homeless rate, passed a bill that bans “any program where persons are provided with regular, periodic cash payments” they can use “for any purpose.”
As of the end of February, lawmakers in some four other states had introduced bills with similar bans.
Who’s driving this nationally coordinated move to end experiments in basic income? Some of America’s most secretive wealthy, charges a recent analysis by Scott Santens, the founder and president of the Income To Support All Foundation.
These wealthy, Santens notes, have been bankrolling an outfit that calls itself the Foundation for Government Accountability, “a lobbying group with a billionaire-fueled junk science record every American should know about.”
Among the Foundation’s prime funders: the hard-right billionaires Richard and Liz Uihlein, the nation’s fourth-largest contributors to political campaigns. The Uihleins have pumped almost $18 million into the machinations of the Foundation for Government Accountability. Almost that much has come from the Donors Trust network, a powerhouse that has become what Mother Jonescalls “the dark-money ATM of the right.”
Other major Foundation for Government Accountability funders include assorted deep-pocket entities with a history, notes Climate Investigations Center director Kert Davies, of “hating regulation and trying to stop any progress on things like climate change because they see it as almost a step toward communism.”
The billionaires underwriting all these entities, Income To Support All Foundation.’s Scott Santens believes, share a common fundamental outlook. They fear “a world where things are a bit less unequal,” a world without so many average people “having no power to say anything but yes.”
May those rich see emerge that new world they so fear. Soon.
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To Unrig Economy, Dems Propose Raising Taxes on Wealth Over $50 Million
"The Ultra-Millionaire Tax is a critically needed policy that would ensure that the super-rich who have benefited from a rigged system will begin to pay their fair share in taxes," said one advocate.
Mar 19, 2024
Weeks after U.S. President Joe Biden won applause from progressives for using his State of the Union address to go on the offense against the Republican Party's tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, Democrats in Congress introduced legislation aimed at raising revenue by ensuring multimillionaires and billionaires pay their fair share.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was originally joined by Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) in 2021 to introduce the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, and the three lawmakers on Monday announced measures to strengthen the proposal.
The new legislation includes stronger anti-tax evasion rules regarding trusts, where "ultrawealthy" families frequently stash money to avoid paying taxes—costing the federal government $5 billion to $7 billion per year.
"As President Biden says: No one thinks it's fair that Jeff Bezos gets enough tax loopholes that he pays at a lower rate than a public school teacher," said Warren. "All my bill is asking is that when you make it big, bigger than $50 million dollars, then on that next dollar, you pitch in two cents, so everyone else can have a chance."
The lawmakers said the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act would bring in at least $3 trillion over 10 years by requiring a 2 cent tax for every dollar of wealth over $50 million—affecting just the top 0.05% of households in the United States.
The bill includes a 3% tax on the wealthiest households overall, with a 1% annual surtax on the net worth of households and trusts over $1 billion.
Susan Harley, managing director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch division, said the three Democrats have zeroed in on "the only way to truly tackle the injustice of income inequality in this country... to address wealth hoarding."
"The Ultra-Millionaire Tax is a critically needed policy that would ensure that the super-rich who have benefited from a rigged system will begin to pay their fair share in taxes," said Harley.
Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, economists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the richest 0.1% of Americans saw their share of the country's wealth triple from 7% to 20% from the late 1970s and 2019, while the bottom 90% saw their share "plummet from about 35% to 25%."
"For too long, the ultrawealthy in America have been able to dodge taxes on a large scale," said Saez and Zucman in response to the updated proposal. "As a result they often pay much less, relative to their ability to pay, than the rest of the population. The ultra-millionaire tax would address this fundamental unfairness, and raise critical revenues for much needed investments that would make the country—and us all—richer."
Boyle noted that he witnessed firsthand the loss of economic power among working Americans as the rich got richer in recent decades.
"As the son of a union household, I witnessed every day how incredibly hard my parents worked to build a middle-class life for our family. It is simply wrong that millions of hardworking families pay a higher tax rate than billionaires," said Boyle. "This legislation will fight back against Republicans' decadeslong scheme to rig our tax code against middle-class families and in favor of multimillionaires and billionaires."
The lawmakers introduced the proposal as economic justice advocates have recently cataloged price gouging and "shrinkflation" that's aimed at boosting shareholders' and CEOs' pay while working people struggle to afford necessities like diapers and groceries.
"The system is not working when the richest 1% of Americans own more than 30% of our nation's wealth but pay just 3.2% of their wealth in taxes while others pay twice as much," said Jayapal. "Our country's tax system needs urgent reform, and the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act is a major step toward making sure the wealthy finally pay their fair share. With this legislation, we can narrow the racial wealth gap and invest trillions of dollars in schools, clean energy, housing, healthcare, and more to improve lives in communities across America."
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