But this is not to say that rich people don’t need to pay their fair share because they certainly do. In 2021, ProPublica published a special report based on “troves” of federal tax documents involving thousands of the wealthiest Americans – including President Trump – over a fifteen-year period. < The documents were leaked to ProPublica and The New York Times by Charles Littlejohn, an IRS contractor. Littlejohn was sentenced to 5 years in prison after pleading guilty to one count of unauthorized disclosure of tax returns and return information. >
In what the president of ProPublica Richard Tofel called “the most important story we have ever published,” the investigation revealed:
“In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes. Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.”
In their words, ProPublica’s investigation “demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The IRS records show that the wealthiest can – perfectly legally – pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.”
< Sidebar: That said, The Wall Street Journal reported that “figures for 2021 show that the top 1 percent of Americans reported 26.3 percent of the country’s adjusted gross income, while paying 45.8 percent of total income taxes… the top 10 percent of earners in 2021 provided 75.8 percent of the revenue.” >
But regardless, if the uber rich don’t pay their fair share that’s technically not their fault. As Warren Buffett, consistently one of the richest men in the world, said in a 2011 article titled Stop Coddling the Super-Rich:
“Our leaders have asked for ‘shared sacrifice.’ But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched. While the poor and middle-class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as ‘carried interest,’ thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors. These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.”
That’s a pretty solid point, don’t ya think?
