You’ve got to pay taxes tomorrow. America’s oligarchs? Not so much.
I mean that figuratively and literally. Last year, a team of economists led by University of California, Berkeley’s Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez scrutinized data from 2018 to 2020 and found that the total effective federal tax rate of America’s richest 0.0002 percent—roughly 400 households—was 24 percent of their true economic income. Yet the average US household pays 30 percent, and families with the highest incomes pay 45 percent.
What the heck?
Well, most of America’s 1,000 or so billionaires don’t take salaries. Their bloated fortunes consist largely of untaxed “paper gains” on their unsold capital investments. That’s real economic income. But it’s also income the oligarchs and their advisers in the Wealth Defense Industry have made sure the IRS cannot touch.
Today, in a smart new piece for Mother Jones, former tax attorney Bob Lord likens the government’s faulty definition of income to a virus—an oligarchy virus—that “was embedded in America’s economic DNA for a century, biding its time, waiting for the appropriate conditions to reveal itself,” Lord writes. “And then we created those conditions, unleashing it to infect our institutions of culture and democracy, replicate, and burst forth to infect anew.”
Lord deftly explains all this and proffers solutions—fingers crossed we’re not too late—and shows how these billionaires’ fortunes, properly taxed over the years, would be a fraction of what they are today.
You don’t want to miss this Tax Day story.
—Michael Mechanic
