Vote to Pass HR 1 and More About Money
If HR 1 passes:
- Presidents will have to disclose tax returns & divest from conflicts of interest
- Members of Congress will be banned from serving on corporate boards
- Donors’ names will be associated with dark money groups they fund
- Partisan gerrymandering will be banned
#CancelTheQOP
The GOP is trying to pass 253 voter suppression bills in 43 states. We can’t let them win.
How about we stop asking Krysten Sinema and Joe Manchin if they support the filibuster and start asking them why they’re comfortable doing nothing while the GOP introduces 253 bills across the country eviscerating the right to vote?
TAX THE RICH
The IRS Admits It Doesn’t Audit the Rich Because It’s Too Hard
The Federalist Dark Money comes from Richard Uihlein
THE RICHEST .01% ASKS TO BE TAXED NOW
American billionaires got $434 billion richer during the pandemic
Shrink the $7.5 Trillion Tax Gap
How Biden Funds His Next Bill: Shrink the $7.5 Trillion Tax Gap
The I.R.S. is often unable to detect or fight blatant tax cheating by the rich and big businesses. Restoring it is a solution that pays for itself. By Chye-Ching Huang
Ms. Huang is the executive director of the Tax Law Center at the New York University School of Law. March 10, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
Credit…Stefani Reynolds
[ … After a decade of budget cuts for the agency, the cracks in the I.R.S. are costing taxpayers trillions of dollars and growing impossible to ignore. The agency is increasingly unable to detect or address blatant tax cheating by high-income filers and the largest businesses. In February, I.R.S. Commissioner Charles P. Rettig told Congress that about $570 billion in taxes owed in 2019 were not paid. That tax gap is projected to total about $7.5 trillion over this decade. Meanwhile, the I.R.S. answered fewer than a quarter of its phone calls from people seeking help with their taxes.
From 2010 to 2019, lawmakers cut the I.R.S. enforcement budget by more than 20 percent.
… Perhaps unsurprisingly, the wealthiest are the prime beneficiaries of the status quo. Estimates suggest that the top 1 percent of filers account for at least 28 percent and as much as 70 percent of the tax gap. The wealthiest households and largest businesses often use a complex maze of financial arrangements and offshore entities that make it incredibly hard and time-consuming for the I.R.S. to untangle what taxes are owed but not paid.
Largely as a result of its budget cuts, the I.R.S. has lost a third of its staff members who are knowledgeable enough to audit highly complex returns. While audit rates have dropped for tax filers across the board, they’ve fallen most steeply for America’s highest-income filers and its largest corporations: They are now about half as likely to be audited as they were a decade ago.
Even when the I.R.S. detects the most obvious forms of tax noncompliance among the wealthy, it is stretched too thin to follow up adequately. A Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report published last year found the I.R.S. had failed to follow up with more than 369,000 high-income households that simply did not file a tax return in prior years.
Recent reporting by The Times on Donald Trump’s dodgy tax returns — which included his highly questionable use of deductions and expenses — was just the latest revelation of apparently different standards for the rich. But it also heightened concern among tax experts regarding the ability of the I.R.S. to do its job when it’s so deeply depleted. </snip>
THE WEALTHIEST WANT TO BE TAXED.