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To: studdog who wrote (4123)	4/12/2004 5:33:57 PM
From: ThirdEye	Respond to of 116555

Speaking of the great divide: Stroke the rich IRS has become a subsidy system for super-wealthy Americans IRS winks at rich deadbeats David Cay Johnston <snip> Through explicit policies, as well as tax laws never reported in the news, Congress now literally takes money from those making $30,000 to $500,000 per year and funnels it in subtle ways to the super rich -- the top 1/100th of 1 percent of Americans. <snip> On March 30, Congress was told that 78 percent of known tax cheats in investment partnerships are not even asked to pay because there are not enough tax collectors to go after them. Congress and the Bush administration rejected the request by the IRS Oversight Board, a citizen panel Congress created, for extra money to pursue some of these tax cheats and stop about 1 percent of the $311 billion in estimated annual tax cheating. In the late '90s, a crooked banker gave the IRS records on 1,600 criminal tax cheats who used his Cayman Islands bank. The Justice Department prosecuted 49 of them, but the other 1,551 were not even asked to pay, lawyers for some of them say. Two billionaires in New York, the art dealer Alec Wildenstein and his former wife, Jocelyn, testified under oath in their divorce that for 30 years they never filed a tax return. They have not been prosecuted. <snip> While letting rich tax cheats run wild, Congress did finance a crackdown on the poor. The working poor, most of whom make less than $16,000, are eight times more likely to be audited than millionaire investors in partnerships. The audits of low-income taxpayers found little cheating. Two-thirds of the poor get either their full refund or more than they sought. etc., etc. sfgate.com