Month: July 2020

WE CAN’T AFFORD OUR RIGGED TAX SYSTEM

Our unfair tax system is one piece of our rigged economic system. To put our tax system in some perspective, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) collects nearly 95% of all the federal government’s revenue; it collected $3.5 trillion in taxes in 2018.

My previous post on how our overall economic system is rigged, noted that the CARES Act, the $2.2 trillion coronavirus pandemic response, tilted our tax system further in favor of the wealthy by providing $135 billion in tax cuts for the richest 1% of Americans. This is money that could have been used to provide aid to workers who lost their jobs or to buy personal protective equipment for front-line workers or other needs related to the effects of the pandemic. Ironically, Republicans are now complaining about the cost of the pandemic relief efforts!

Another example of the rigging of our tax system in favor of wealthy individuals and corporations is the substantial tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals that were at the center of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). The Act failed to deliver any significant benefits to workers and the middle class, despite politicians’ promises. (See this post for more detail.)

However, the tax cuts of the TCJA weren’t enough for the big multi-national corporations, so they lobbied, quite successfully, to rig the tax system even further to their benefit by getting additional tax reductions in the rules and regulations that were written to implement the TCJA. (See this post for more detail.)

A year after the TCJA passed, a study of the largest corporations in the U.S. found that of 379 large, profitable corporations:

  • 91 (almost a quarter of them) paid no federal income tax including Amazon, Chevron, Halliburton, and IBM.
  • Another 56 of them (15%) paid less than 5% of profits in taxes.
  • The average effective federal income tax rate for these 379 large, profitable corporations was 11.3%, barely half of the reduced tax rate of 21% in the TCJA (down from 35%), and the lowest rate in the history of this analysis, which was first done in 1984. [1]

So, not only are wealthy individuals and corporations successful in getting politicians to cut the taxes they owe, but many of them then do everything they can to avoid paying even the reduced (I’m tempted to say, minimal) taxes they owe under our rigged tax system.

Some of them simply don’t pay the taxes they owe. According to a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) [2] unpaid taxes averaged $381 billion per year (roughly 14% of federal taxes owed) from 2011 to 2013. The richest 1% of taxpayers are responsible for 70% ($267 billion) of this total. [3]

The amount of unpaid taxes is growing because the IRS’s budget has been cut by 20% since 2010 (after adjusting for inflation), reducing its capacity to crack down on tax avoidance. Audits of the tax returns of the highest income taxpayers have declined by 63% from 2010 to 2018 and now occur at the same rate as for the poorest taxpayers. This has happened because the IRS no longer has the capacity to engage in audits of the complex tax returns of the rich. The number of IRS personnel who handle these complex cases fell by about 40% between 2010 and 2018. [4] Enforcement action against high-income individuals who do not file a tax return has been reduced to simply mailing a notice to them.

The CBO report estimated that for every dollar added to the IRS budget for tax law enforcement, about three dollars in unpaid taxes would be collected. In addition to reduced auditing of wealthy individuals, the frequency of audits of the largest corporations (those with over $20 billion in assets) also dropped from 2010 to 2018; it dropped by roughly 50%.

In his reaction to the CBO report, Senator Sanders stated that “the primary beneficiaries of IRS funding cuts are wealthy tax cheats and large corporations.” [5] In response to an earlier study of audit rates, Senator Wyden stated that “We have two tax systems in this country, and nothing illustrates that better than the IRS ignoring wealthy tax cheats while penalizing low-income workers over small mistakes.” [6]

Our tax system is rigged from top to bottom – from reduced tax rates for wealthy individuals and corporations, to tax loopholes and subsidies for them, to tax dodging by them, to weak enforcement of tax laws to stop their tax avoidance. Hundreds of billions of dollars (actually probably well over a trillion dollars) of tax revenue from wealthy individuals and businesses are lost every year because of unfairly low tax rates, special interest tax breaks, and tax dodging.

When politicians say we can’t afford to support education or unemployment benefits or food assistance or whatever, don’t believe them. What we can’t afford is rich individuals and corporations who don’t pay their fair share in taxes due to our rigged tax system.

[1]      Gardner, M., Roque, L., & Wamhoff, S., Dec. 2019, “Corporate tax avoidance in the first year under the Trump tax law,” Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy (https://itep.org/corporate-tax-avoidance-in-the-first-year-of-the-trump-tax-law/)

[2]      Congressional Budget Office, July 2020, “Trends in the Internal Revenue Service’s funding and enforcement,” (https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2020-07/56422-CBO-IRS-enforcement.pdf)

[3]      Johnson, J., 7/9/20, “‘An absolute outrage’: Sanders rips ‘wealthy tax cheats’ as CBO estimates $381 billion in annual unpaid taxes,” Common Dreams (https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/07/09/absolute-outrage-sanders-rips-wealthy-tax-cheats-cbo-estimates-381-billion-annual)

[4]      Congressional Budget Office, July 2020, see above

[5]      Johnson, J., 7/9/20, see above

[6]      Kiel, P., 5/30/19, “It’s getting worse: The IRS now audits poor Americans at about the same rate as the top 1%,” ProPublica (https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-now-audits-poor-americans-at-about-the-same-rate-as-the-top-1-percent)

RECENT EXAMPLES OF A RIGGED ECONOMIC SYSTEM

Here are some recent examples of how our rigged economic system favors wealthy individuals and big corporations.

In the CARES Act, the $2.2 trillion coronavirus pandemic response, Republican Senators slipped in a tax break that will give each of 43,000 wealthy business owners a $1.6 million tax cut, on average. Hedge fund investors and owners of real estate businesses (including President Trump and his family) will receive the great majority of this tax cut windfall. [1]

Overall, the CARES Act provides $135 billion in tax cuts for the richest 1% of Americans. This is money that could have been used to provide aid to workers who lost their jobs or to buy personal protective equipment for front-line workers.

Moreover, the Trump Administration and Republicans in Congress are considering a variety of additional tax cuts for investors and businesses for the next pandemic relief bill. [2] Supposedly, these tax cuts will stimulate the economy and help it return to normal, but what they really do is make the rich richer. And while Trump and the Republicans claim that there should be no more spending on unemployment and payments to individuals because we’ve spent enough, tax cuts are simply spending before the fact of revenue collection rather than after the fact. Conceptually, there is no difference, other than who gets the money.

Perhaps the ultimate indication of how rigged our economic system is, is that the wealth of billionaires in the U.S. increased almost $600 billion or 20% between March 18 and June 17 as the pandemic crushed the lives and livelihoods of mainstream Americans. The 643 U.S. billionaires, who are overwhelmingly white males, saw their aggregate wealth increase from $2.9 trillion to $3.5 trillion, an increase of about $1 billion a piece, on average. [3] [4]

Meanwhile, working and middle-class households lost $6.5 trillion in wealth and over 45 million Americans applied for unemployment insurance. The 643 billionaires’ increase in wealth was twice as much as what the federal government spent on the one-time stimulus checks that went to 150 million Americans.

The billionaires and other wealthy individuals have used their incredible wealth to gain extraordinary influence over our politics and policy making. This led to the tax cuts in the CARES Act, in the 2017 Tax Act, and on numerous other occasions. As a result, the taxes paid by these billionaires decreased by 79% as a percentage of their wealth from 1980 to 2018. [5]

As another indicator of a rigged economic system, as the pandemic hit in early 2020 only the richest 20% of U.S. households had regained the same level of wealth that they had had prior to the Great Recession of 2008. The other 80% of households were still struggling with the economic hangover of the 2008 financial industry crash. The 400 wealthiest billionaires, on the other hand, recovered their wealth in three years and in ten years had increased their wealth by over 80%.

On the corporate front, corporations are rewarding their investors, i.e., shareholders, while laying off their workers. For example, Caterpillar closed three facilities in late March and two weeks later made a $500 million distribution to shareholders. Levi Strauss announced on April 7th that it would stop paying workers and furloughed about 4,000 over the following month. Nonetheless, it paid $32 million to shareholders in April. Stanley Black & Decker announced furloughs and layoffs on April 2nd, but within two weeks issued a $106 million dividend to shareholders. [6]

You may recall that in August 2019 the chief executives of 181 companies from the Business Roundtable released a statement announcing that companies should deliver value to customers, workers, and suppliers, as well as shareholders. To-date, three of the executives who signed that statement – ones from Caterpillar, Stanley Black & Decker, and Steelcase – have furloughed workers while paying dividends to shareholders.

In our rigged economic system, the capitalists in government bailout capitalists (i.e., business owners and investors), not workers, home owners, parents, students, schools, states and cities, our social services, or our so-called safety net. Even small businesses get left behind as wealthy investors and corporations are taken care of first and foremost. This was evident in the 2008 bailout after the collapse of the financial and mortgage sectors and it’s evident again in the response to this pandemic.

I urge you to contact your U.S. Representative and Senators and to tell them that pandemic relief should go to workers, middle-class and low-income households, and small businesses. Not only is this what would be fair and democratic, this would support our economy because two-thirds of economic activity is consumer purchases. If consumers can buy, they will keep the economy going and create demand for the goods and services businesses produce. Bailouts to corporations and investors will make them wealthier but will do little to keep the economy going and very little to help the mainstream residents of America.

You can find contact information for your US Representative at  http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/ and for your US Senators at http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm.

[1]      Stein, J., 4/14/20, “Tax change in coronavirus package overwhelmingly benefits millionaires, congressional body finds,” The Washington Post

[2]      Tankersley, J., 5/6/20, “Trump considers tax-cut proposal for new bill,” The New York Times

[3]      McCarthy, N., 6/22/20, “U.S. billionaire wealth surged since the start of the pandemic,” Forbes

[4]      Americans for Tax Fairness, 6/18/20, “3 months into COVID-19 pandemic: Billionaires boom as middle class implodes,” (https://americansfortaxfairness.org/issue/3-months-covid-19-pandemic-billionaires-boom-middle-class-implodes/)

[5]      Collins, C., 5/11/20, “Billionaires are getting even richer from the pandemic. Enough is enough,” CNN Business (https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/28/perspectives/inequality-coronavirus-billionaires/index.html)

[6]      Whoriskey, P., 5/6/20, “Amid layoffs, investors reap dividends,” The Boston Globe from The Washington Post