Edit: Not directed at wjfox, responding to the twitter poster and talking about the topic in general.
wjfox wrote: ↑Thu Nov 18, 2021 7:40 am
The hyper rich don't pay their taxes in the United States generally because when the IRS audits them they fight back with multi-million dollar court cases that bog the agency down and it generally gives up. The IRS gives up because despite constant complaints about how ruthless of an organization it is, it is only ruthless to the working class generally. The IRS audits the working class more frequently than it does the rich because it knows it can generally win an audit on lower income people who can't afford multi-million dollar legal fees whereas auditing higher income brackets poses financial risk to the agency.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the- ... income-tax
In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.
https://www.propublica.org/article/irs- ... t-the-poor
The IRS audits the working poor at about the same rate as the wealthiest 1%. Now, in response to questions from a U.S. senator, the IRS has acknowledged that’s true but professes it can’t change anything unless it is given more money.
Corporations as institutions are even worse offenders than individuals. Microsoft literally rewrote the law to favor them during their ongoing legal battle with the IRS and will likely win as a result.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the- ... ot-tougher
Microsoft had shifted at least $39 billion in U.S. profits to Puerto Rico, where the company’s tax consultants, KPMG, had persuaded the territory’s government to give Microsoft a tax rate of nearly 0%. Microsoft had justified this transfer with a ludicrous-sounding deal: It had sold its most valuable possession — its intellectual property — to an 85-person factory it owned in a small Puerto Rican city.
Microsoft fought back with every tool it could muster. Business organizations, ranging from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to tech trade groups, rallied, hiring attorneys to jump into the fray on Microsoft’s side in court and making their case to IRS leadership and lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Soon, members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, were decrying the IRS’ tactics and introducing legislation to stop the IRS from ever taking similar steps again.
The outcome of the audit remains to be seen — the Microsoft case grinds on — but the blowback was effective. Last year, the company’s allies succeeded in changing the law, removing or limiting tools the IRS team had used against the company. The IRS, meanwhile, has become notably less bold. Drained of resources by years of punishing budget cuts, the agency has largely retreated from challenging the largest corporations. The IRS declined to comment for this article.
In conclusion, the rich generally write the laws and generally only follow the law themselves when they feel like it or it aligns with their interests. Barring the most egregious offenses they generally get away with it too. This is all obvious as America is an oligarchy, not a democracy.
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/def ... cs.doc.pdf
The interlocking relationship between political lobbying (legal corruption,) government grants, government development tax credits and laws passed to favor monopolies increasingly presents a case where it is hard to even tell where private business ends and public government begins. The revolving door is so great that I'd dare to posit that Tesla, Amazon, Walmart, Lockheed Martin, and the United States Government are all functionally the same institution even when some "internal" power struggles manifest from time-to-time. (This excludes some local governments and select institutions that are still publicly controlled.)
Americans, and citizens of other ostensibly "liberal democracies" around the world need to examine their true political moment more critically. The public discourse needs to shift from, "how the government benefits from Tesla share appreciation," to "how can the public renationalize the government and seize the 'private' industry it has already payed for."
Because dear readers, we must look at what will actually happen, not what general discourse would like to present is happening. What will really happen, as it has already happened before, and is happening as we speak; is that our tax dollars will fund the R&D of a given monopolistic private corporation--say Tesla--then said corporation will cover much of their operating costs with more public funds, then said corporation will reap the profit of the public dollar, than said corporation will evade taxes on said profit, then even if some meager taxes are collected successfully they will revolve predominately right back into some other monopoly engaging in the same private-public cartel that enabled the original theft to begin with!
And so what words are their of socialism even? A true return to mere liberal democracy would necessitate massive national seizures of corporate property at this point by virtue that so much of the countries wealth, and the world's wealth for that matter on the international stage, has been siphoned into the hands of monopolies through the use of ostensibly public funds. At what point do we stop calling taxes taxation in this political moment? The character of the flow of funds in many countries today more resembles that of feudal tributes and or tithes than it does the functioning of a public government for the benefit of all citizens within the society.