Work Reform

To summarize some of the source material for articles like this, by propublica: https://www.propublica.org/article/billionaires-tax-avoidance-techniques-irs-files

1. Not selling stock, no income to tax, they rather borrow against stock value, which isn't taxable.
2. The 5 Billion IRA, pioneered by Peter Thiel, the Roth IRA is a type of account that shields income from taxes and is intended to help working people save for retirement. In 1999 Thiel stuffed low value paypal shares into his that reaped billions in untaxed gains.
3. High Tax Rate Trading into Low Tax Rate Income. When they do realize income, billionaires do it by recognizing gains on long term investments, such as stock sales, which are taxed at lower rates, (bush tax cuts lowered it even farther than it was, info not part of article I'm citing though,) Jeff Yass, head of Susquehanna International Group, a Wall Street Parasite, pioneered creative ways to transform short term trading gains into long term ones. Saving over 1 billion in taxes in 6 years as such. (To have that much in short term gains, it's likely they are utilizing Flash Orders. Tapped into exchanges, computer programs on lightning fast switches ascertain the movement of stocks by the trades being submitted, and slips in their trades on those stocks leveraged with borrowings before those orders go through, making a sort of parasitic gain, it's not even illegal.) Details https://www.propublica.org/article/jeff-yass-susquehanna-tiktok-tax-avoidance, and https://www.propublica.org/article/jeff-yass-susquehanna-tiktok-tax-avoidance
4. Sports ownership: Make money while legally reporting losses. (This encompasses more than sports ownership but losses in any investment have long been offset against taxable income in others, they can pull losses back 3 years to offset taxes already paid, or forward like 10 years to offset future income. This is why billionaires have paid virtually nothing since 2008, even as the government bailed them out and they have never been richer.) But the article details sports teams allowing for even profitable teams to allow erasing taxable income. Sometimes the same expenses can be deducted twice, like costs of players' contracts. Allowed to depreciate players' value, and so many deductions that the owners pay less in taxes than people working at the stadiums serving food and beverages or working ticket kiosks or security.
5. Special tax breaks for Oil Drilling. Billionaires can pay zero taxes in ten years taking advantage of all of these tax breaks, many furthered by the Bush administration, at Dick Cheney's influence. Although that is not mentioned in the article.
6. Using Hobbies as sources of offsetting taxable wealth. Race horses, 6 owners harnessed 600 million in write offs on horse racing operations at the 2021 Kentucky Derby for instance. Luxury Hotels for another, Beanie Baby founder Ty Warner went 12 years without paying taxes after splurging on a couple of four seasons hotels.
7. Change the Laws. Investing in politicians pays for itself. Not the least with this administration, but let's be honest, none of them have changed anything back. Business owners also slashed their salaries and categorized the money as passthrough income to avoid taxes.
8. Tech Billionaires pay less than hedge fund managers now, of the top 400 earners, those with over 110 million/year in income, overall they paid low rates, but Tech, heirs, private equity executives, stood out for drawing on the type of techniques mentioned above. Also wealthy politicians like the governors of colorado and west virginia used them. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-these-ultrawealthy-politicians-avoided-paying-taxes
9. The real champions of tax avoidance paid so little they collected stimulus checks, at least 18 of them in 2020, because their returns placed them below the cutoff of 150k for a married couple. https://www.propublica.org/article/these-billionaires-received-taxpayer-funded-stimulus-checks-during-the-pandemic
10. Holes in the estate tax that you can drive an armored convoy through filled with gold. They've been poking holes in the estate tax for decades, once again the bush administration made a lot of changes that enabled basically all of the billionaires to avoid this tax. All under dishonest arguments, railing against the injustice of the tax affecting family farms and the like, which it did not do. It only affected the largest estates, and now it doesn't touch them.

Half of the 100 richest families used real estate dodging trusts in just one method of dodging this tax. One three century long fortune passed down to a great great granddaughter collecting 210 million before her 19th birthday with no taxes levied for instance.

In analysis of this information from the linked propublica article and the public record, none of this would be possible if the IRS actually enforced the law against the rich. Neither party has changed the IRS back to what it was before the Bush Administration, let alone to what it was before Reagan.

Bush reassigned something like tens of thousands of auditors, two different times, from the wealthy to the poor. Their new thing is chiseling people out of the Earned Income Tax Credit. The cost of these enforcements exceeds the amounts collected, and they habitually with the EIC prevent/take away the credit when the person qualifies to receive it. Denying benefits to people that qualify for them, spending more money on doing it than they save.

While the rich do the above, and everyone down the line from them also chisels the feds out of all the money our corrupt lawmakers have given them ways to do over the decades. The entire tax burden has been shifted onto the shoulders of working people that we've been led to have nothing but contempt for. If we are working we have contempt for those below us, even as the ones handing you that opinion have contempt for you being below them.

The democrats didn't change anything back, not to any significant degree, and even Biden getting a lot of money to actually refund the IRS didn't go into effect for years, guarenteeing it would be cancelled by the Republicans unless the democrats won, something they do over and over, with broadband internet to rural areas for instance. In the WPA they started projects in 6 months, or democrats set things up to take years and years before any work is started. It's not something the republicans force on them, they choose to set it up this way.

Beyond putting a timeline on the IRS doing anything, they didn't wholesale change all of those auditors back to the wealthy where they MADE money on enforcements not lost it, not to any large degree, as Obama didn't before him despite token gestures to look like they did something. Then just to top it off, Biden cancelled a quarter of his IRS funding in exchange for increasing the debt limit, the Republicans threatened to scuttle the ship they were all on, Biden refused to negotiate, but the republicans knew better. They played chicken, threatening to blow them all up, and Biden caved. He was chosen to cave, they have never won a game of chicken. He cancelled a quarter of the funding. All moot anyway as republicans now control the federal government anyway and will turn that money against their opponents and critics now.