Tax Haven
Cheating is Much Costlier than the Annual Safety Net - But the
IRS Keeps Getting CUT
Offshore hoarding of private American wealth is estimated to be
$3.3 trillion (4% of U.S.
$82 trillion financial wealth).
The
safety net costs about
$400 billion per year, or,
including Medicaid, about
$900 billion per year.
Taking on the tax cheaters seems like an obvious response,
instead of cutting the safety net. But the IRS budget itself has
been steadily cut.
Amazingly, and
perversely, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS),
which could be recovering much of our hidden money, has seen its
staff and budget
slashed 14 to 18 percent since
the recession.
Our Own
Country is the World's Second Biggest Tax Haven
While the privileged American tax cheaters are taking money from
their own country, they're not shy about taking from the rest of
the world.
According to the
Financial Secrecy Index of
the
Tax Justice Network, the U.S.
is second only to Switzerland as a
tax haven.
Their report states:
"Financial
secrecy provided by the U.S. has caused untold harm to the
ordinary citizens of foreign countries, whose elites have
used the United States as a bolt-hole for looted wealth."
Record Low
Unemployment? - Yes, because One Hour of Work Counts as Employed
Part of that 'booming' economy is a low unemployment rate.
As
noted recently, the Bureau
of Labor Statistics bases the official unemployment rate on
employees "who did any work for pay or profit" during the week
being surveyed.
That includes
part-time workers who are
employed for just
one hour a week.
The unemployment rate also fails to include those who have
given up looking for work -
4% more Americans than in the
year 2000.
We're
Gradually Giving Away Our Country's Wealth to the Children of
the Rich
It's not a Death Tax, it's a Deadbeat Tax...
Anywhere from
35 percent to
55 percent of U.S. household
wealth is inherited. It's going to get worse.
A Boston College
study estimated that $59
trillion will be transferred from American estates by 2061.
The study calls it,
"the greatest
wealth transfer in U.S. history."
That's almost as much
as the total financial wealth in the U.S. today.
But, as Robert
Reich
notes, in 2014 only 1.4 out of
every 1,000 estates owed any estate tax.
So most of the money
to be passed down from Baby Boomers will be going to kids who
never earned any of it and won't have to pay any taxes on it.
One might argue that the loss of all this tax revenue is a good
thing, because then philanthropists will step up and fund
the needs of society.
Not much chance of
that. The super-rich have little incentive to provide housing or
education or infrastructure or clean water to poor
neighborhoods.
Here's their
incentive:
Donor-Advised
Funds (DAFs).
These 'philanthropic' funds allow big tax writeoffs, and the
'donated' money can be invested and reinvested with little
of it going to real causes.
The report "Gilded
Giving" by Inequality.org
states that,
"this charitable
revenue can be warehoused, sitting for years or decades
after a charitable deduction has been taken, before any
significant payout is made to public nonprofits."
As We Keep
Shooting Each Other, Our Leaders Keep Cutting Mental Health Care
Why should privileged Americans want to avoid this issue?
Because they're not
about to make a financial commitment to the root cause of most
of the violence in our country, which is the overwhelming stress
and suffering brought on by deprivation in the richest nation in
the world.
According to the National
Institute of Mental Health, anxiety affects nearly one-third
of both adolescents and adults.
But instead of therapy, we use drugs to treat patients
with mental problems, and as a
result
pharmaceutical companies make
billions of dollars at the expense of incapacitated Americans.
Incredibly,
over 96 percent of
"last-resort" mental health hospital beds have been eliminated
in the past sixty years. More incredibly, the 2019 budget for
the Department of Health and Human Services includes a
21 percent decrease from the
2017 level.
Most incredible of all is the hypocrisy accompanying this
disdain for the needs of American adults and children.
As when Donald
Trump
says,
"To every parent,
teacher and child who is hurting so badly, we are here for
you whatever you need, whatever we can do to ease your
pain."
