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Original title: The 25 richest Americans have “almost no taxes”?Democrats call for tax increases, Republicans worry about leaks
On June 8, local time, a non-profit news organization called ProPublica in the United States released a survey that showed that the 25 richest Americans rarely pay federal income taxes, and sometimes they don’t. Once the incident was exposed, it triggered heated discussions between the two parties in Congress on rewriting the tax law and investigating the leakage of confidential data.
According to a report by ProPublica on June 9, according to confidential tax documents obtained by the website from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), from 2014 to 2018, the 25 richest Americans paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes. Although this number is not small, it is nothing compared to the wealth they acquired during this period. According to statistics from Forbes magazine, the wealth of these 25 people has increased by US$401 billion in the past five years.
Therefore, if the ratio of their annual tax payment to the growth of wealth over the same period is regarded as the actual tax rate, then their actual tax rate is only 3.4%. Specifically, in the past five years, Berkshire Hathaway’s largest shareholder, chairman and CEO Buffett’s wealth increased by US$24.3 billion, but he only paid US$23.7 million in taxes. The actual tax rate It is the lowest among 25 people, only 0.1%. Bezos, the founder and current chairman and CEO of Amazon, whose net worth has risen by $99 billion, is closely followed, with an effective tax rate of 0.98%; Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg Limited Partnership, and founder of Space Exploration Technologies Musk’s actual tax rates are 1.3% and 3.27%, respectively.
In response to the report, Congressional Democrats collectively called for the passage of legislation to force the rich to pay taxes. The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and Democratic Senator Ron Wyden said at a hearing on the 8th that “the rich in this country have made great profits during the outbreak of the new crown epidemic, but they have not done what they should do. The obligation.” Wyden said that he is preparing to propose a reform plan, but did not disclose specific details.
Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren said on Twitter that the results of ProPublica’s survey emphasized the importance of establishing a wealth tax system. This is a reform she has always advocated that will tax net assets. Rather than just levying taxes on wages and capital income, the existing system has basically made the super rich get rid of taxes. Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders said frankly that this story shows that “the rich have money, the rich have power, and the rich have lobbyists, which causes the rich to not pay taxes.”
As for the Republican senators, they paid more attention to the leak of confidential tax documents. At the hearing, Republican Senator Susan Collins (Susan Collins) pointed out to Attorney General Galanti that the leak was worrying, saying that “these highly classified personal files were obtained through illegal means.”
It is worth noting that the “Wall Street Journal” published an article that someone disclosed these confidential tax data to support the tax increase plan proposed by the current Democratic President Biden at the end of April. “It is no coincidence that the leak at this time.”
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