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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PartyTime who wrote (9783)	4/12/2004 12:51:17 PM
From: American Spirit	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 173976

Cheney-Bush AWOL on collecting taxes from super rich: Tax system subsidizes super-rich David Cay Johnston, author of a recent book on the tax code, wrote this infuriating expose in the San Francisco Chronicle saying Americans don't understand what the tax system ahs become. "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. People making $60,000 paid a larger share of their 2001 income in federal income, Social Security and Medicare taxes than a family making $25 million, the latest Internal Revenue Service data show. And in income taxes alone, people making $400,000 paid a larger share of their incomes than the 7,000 households who made $10 million or more." "While millions of Americans in the last quarter-century debated about who shot J.R. and scurried for news about who would be Jennifer Lopez's next lover, Congress quietly passed tax laws that shift the tax burden from the 28,000 Americans in households with incomes of $8 million per year or more. One 1985 law, promoted in the Senate as relieving middle class Americans, gave a huge tax break to corporate executives who make personal use of company jets. CEOs may now fly to vacations or Saturday golf outings in luxury for a penny a mile. Congress shifted the real cost of about $6 per mile to shareholders, who pay two-thirds, and to taxpayers who suffer the rest of the cost lost as a result of reduced corporate income taxes. Since 1988, Congress has also cut in half the Internal Revenue Service's capacity to enforce tax laws, replacing it with extra effort to reduce audits of corporations and the rich." "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." "There are now seminars that show business owners how to drop out of the tax system with virtually no risk of detection by the IRS, which relies on a computer system installed when John F. Kennedy was president. … 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. These and other unseen changes in the tax system are major factors in profound economic changes that have caused so many in America to lurch from job to job, a fourth of which pay less than $8 an hour, while helping a very few grow very rich."