ARTICLE: How Do Rich People Avoid Paying Taxes? It’s Easy, Actually BY Whizy Kim

Water and oil, night and day, billionaires and paying their fair share in taxes — this is just a short list of iconic opposites. It’s probably not surprising that rich people go to great lengths to avoid paying any more taxes than they absolutely have to, but a new ProPublica investigation, published today, reveals in brutal detail how they get away with paying virtually nothing. Using over 15 years of tax returns from the ultra-rich, the investigation calculates the amount of taxes the 25 richest Americans paid contrasted with how much their net worth grew each year, to get what it calls their “true tax rate.”

Let’s get specific, here, because ProPublica names names. Berkshire Hathaway billionaire Warren Buffet’s true tax rate is 0.10%. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ is 0.98%. Failed presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg’s? 1.30%. Meanwhile, father of Grimes’ child, Elon Musk paid a comparatively high rate of 3.27%. No wonder he’s such a fan of meme stocks — truly a man of the people.

A huge part of these tiny tax rates is the fact that extremely wealthy people maintain their wealth differently than ordinary people. It’s not sitting in a bank, and it’s definitely not stuffed under the mattress. They hold it in assets like stocks and real estate, which are only taxed when sold. Until then, it’s “unrealized,” not counting as income. Buffet, for example, reported an income of $125 million between 2014 to 2018, despite the fact that his net worth grew by $24.3 billion. Maybe you’ve heard before that Jeff Bezos made a salary around $80,000 as Amazon’s CEO. That’s obviously not the same thing as saying that his wealth only grew by $80K per year. Keeping your salary low is one way the ultra-rich get to keep more of their wealth. Bezos reported $6.5 billion to the IRS between 2006 to 2018, yet his net worth grew by $127 billion. In 2011, he reported a net loss and claimed a child tax credit. He’s currently worth around $187 billion.

From 2014 to 2018, according to ProPublica, the 25 richest Americans increased their wealth to the tune of $401 billion. They paid 3.4% of that back in taxes. It compares this rate to a middle class American in their early 40s, whose wealth increased by an average of $65,000 between the same period. They would have paid about 95% of that back in taxes. Overall, the average American household from 2006 to 2018 paid more in taxes than they accumulated wealth. The report also notes that most of the wealth growth that middle-class Americans experience is thanks to a rise in home value, painting an even starker picture for how Americans who don’t own such assets are supposed to see an upward trend in their net worth.

Even besides this, any income reported on their tax return can be offset by expenses and deductions. The 25 richest Americans can of course enlist the help of tax virtuosos who can perform dazzling acrobatics in tax avoidance. The kicker is that this type of tax avoidance is all basically legal — tax avoidance is using legal means afforded by the U.S. tax code to reduce how much you pay in taxes. Meanwhile, tax dodging is the illegal way that ordinary Americans might misreport their income or make some other mistake on their tax returns. The wealthiest people don’t make such rookie moves. ProPublica notes that owning a sports team, for example, is a possible tax write-off. Another popular way to reduce tax liability is philanthropy, which not only saves billionaires money but also gives them good PR. Even in death, they can cling to much of their wealth. The highest U.S. estate tax rate is currently 40%, but the report says, “many of the richest create foundations for philanthropic giving, which provide large charitable tax deductions during their lifetimes and bypass the estate tax when they die.”

Some billionaire-apologists argue that net worth somehow isn’t really wealth, because much of it isn’t liquid — they couldn’t withdraw billions out of the bank right this second. But that’s a disingenuous twisting of how wealth works. Jeff Bezos might not be able to bathe in a billion-dollar cash pile (not on the spur-of-the-moment, anyway), but everyone understands and respects the power that being “worth” $200 billion confers. There’s an old story about Rockefeller once being denied a loan because he didn’t have verifiable credit at the time, intended to show how the credit system is supposed to treat everyone equally. But does anyone actually believe Rockefeller would have had trouble borrowing any amount of money he wanted? In fact, credit is pretty much exactly how extremely wealthy people thrive. While for many Americans debt has become an unbearable burden, for billionaires it’s the perfect way to avoid giving away more of their wealth, since loans aren’t considered income. Earning an income is petty; the truly rich leverage debt to fund their lavish lifestyles, with a credit line in the billions of dollars. Their material wealth is not so material, but an invisible hand that opens every door.

That billionaires have to pay far less taxes than an ordinary wage-earner does also shows how money is either a vacuum or a magnet. If you don’t have enough of it, its absence becomes a kind of black hole that sucks up even more money. Being poor is more expensive than being rich — you often end up paying more in banking fees, for example, paying more in interest, even paying more for everyday goods. Meanwhile, when you already have money, it allows you to start businesses that balloon into global megacorporations that attract deep-pocketed investors even when they’re not turning a profit.

“The personal federal tax bill for the top 25 in 2018: $1.9 billion,” ProPublica’s report says. “The bill for the wage earners: $143 billion.” Working a job? In this economy? It’s obviously not an efficient way to accumulate wealth. Why should anyone dream of a job or want to return to their difficult, low-wage “essential” job — with CEOs complaining about the indolence of people supposedly preferring to stay on unemployment benefits — while billionaires give back so little of their staggering wealth to the society that helped create them?

Warren Buffet may have been proclaiming for years that billionaires should be taxed more, but he does so in a political landscape where the odds of reversing so much entrenched wealth inequality remains pretty low — or at the least, where progress towards that inches along at a snail’s pace. President Biden has proposed higher tax rates for the rich, with a top marginal tax rate of 39.6%, and there’s been vocal pushback from conservatives. Opponents of the plan have argued this is the biggest tax hike in history, but that’s not true. Top tax rates have been higher than 39.6% before, and our overall tax burden as a nation is far lower than most, ranking 33rd among the 35 richest countries.

And unless the way that the ultra-rich hold their wealth changes — in assets rather than income — as well as whether we tax it or not, how much will a higher marginal tax rate really tip the scales? How do we ensure billionaires contribute an equal share to our society when they can still use foreign tax havens? Is this a flaw to fix like a leaky faucet, or is it a feature of the tax code, which contains so many specific clauses to help the rich? In A Fine Mess, a book about the convoluted U.S. tax system, author T.R. Reid lists several historical examples of this, including a special tax loophole that applied to “an automobile manufacturer incorporated in Delaware on October 13, 1916.” It was a loophole written exclusively for General Motors, without actually naming General Motors. Such examples make it seem like writing the nation’s tax code is like signing someone’s yearbook with an inside joke.

“To the moon” is a phrase often used by r/WallStreetBets traders when they want a stock, such as GameStop, to soar. While an individual trader might gamble on the financial windfall of skyrocketing meme stocks, billionaires seem to know that their wealth is not only safe, but that it will continue to generate more wealth. Instead, they aspire to literally go to the moon; ProPublica’s investigation comes the day after Bezos announced he was going to space with his brother next month. Who knows? Maybe the last frontier will serve as the ultimate tax haven for billionaires. We just hope they’ll stay up there.

ARTICLE: It's perfectly legal for billionaires to pay so little in taxes. Democrats say they could finally change that after the bombshell ProPublica report. BY Juliana Kaplan,Joseph Zeballos-Roig

A ProPublica report based on secret IRS files showed billionaires pay relatively little tax.

Inequality experts have been warning for years that the wealthy pay relatively low taxes.

The details added impetus to a push by Democrats to ramp up taxes on the country's highest earners.

See more stories on Insider's business page.

On Tuesday morning, ProPublica published a bombshell report showing how little America's wealthiest pay in taxes, based on leaked documents from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

The report shows in detail how billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett have seen billions added to their net worth with little impact on their tax bill. It's totally legal, and for many, not all that surprising.

"It's not surprising at all, I think," Chuck Collins, who works at the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies, an organization dedicated to highlighting wealth inequality, told Insider.

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Collins recently wrote a book on the ways the ultrawealthy hide their money and avoid taxation. In it, he uses the term "wealth defense industry" for the cottage industry that's grown around helping the rich hold onto their money.

"It's going to be very hard for ordinary people to decipher these tax transactions because they're purposefully complex," Collins said. "The wealth defense industry, their bread and butter is complexity, and opaqueness."

Chuck Marr, the director of federal tax policy at the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Progressive Priorities, said "we've been making this case for a long time." He pointed to a paper from 2019 that outlines many findings similar to those in Tuesday's report.

Still, it's one thing to know something is likely happening, and another to see the details laid bare, and the figures involved. For example, ProPublica found that Warren Buffett paid 0.1% in "true tax rate," which compares how much he paid each year in taxes to how much his wealth grew.

ProPublica's report could draw widespread attention - and scrutiny - to certain intricacies of the tax code just as President Joe Biden moves to reform taxes to pay for his infrastructure proposals.

Already, Democratic lawmakers are seizing on the public report as a way to kickstart tax reform.

The report "should make it very hard for the Congress to not address it," Marr said. "I think it really underscores, again, that very wealthy people do not pay tax on much of their income. And so this tax bill is a clear opening to address that."

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the world's wealthiest man. Alex Wong/Getty Images

America's wealthiest make most of their money from assets, not income

As the 2019 CBPP paper lays out, a good amount of the income that the wealthiest bring in isn't technically income - or at least it's not taxed that way.

If you work a job where you receive wages in a paycheck, you're probably familiar with the income tax, which taxes the money you get for going to work. Those wages would be income, and you'd be taxed under the income tax.

But, as both the CBPP and ProPublica note, the wealthiest Americans get most of their wealth from assets like stocks, and therefore pay taxes on capital gains.

As Marr and coauthors Samantha Jacoby and Kathleen Bryant write, capital-gains taxes are "effectively voluntary to a substantial extent: High-wealth filers may accumulate capital gains every year as their investments appreciate, but they don't owe tax on those gains until - or unless - they 'realize' the gain, usually by selling the appreciated asset."

So if you hold onto your stock assets, you're not seeing that capital gains rate. Goldman Sachs estimated last month that the wealthiest Americans possessed between $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion in unrealized capital gains at that time. Some argue that those unrealized gains should be taxed, since the wealthiest could be sitting on valuable stocks, making money, and not paying taxes. Meanwhile, researchers at the right-leaning Tax Foundation argue that a progressive consumption tax would be a better way to tax the rich.

ProPublica reported that the ultrawealthy can also borrow hefty sums of money to pay off their bills as they sit on stocks and take in little income. "They'll borrow money and they'll use the stock as collateral," Marr said. That means the wealthy are essentially using these loans as a form of income, but aren't taxed as such.

As Marr, Jacoby, and Bryant write, "this is often a much cheaper strategy than selling stock and paying capital gains taxes, particularly when interest rates are low."

President Joe Biden. Nicholas Kamm / AFP) (Photo by NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP via Getty Images

The report could add flame to the fire for tax reform

Even before the ProPublica report, tax debate had been brewing. In particular, a provision called the "step-up basis" had been facing scrutiny.

Let's say you've held onto stock for your whole life, and it's only grown in value. If you die and leave it to someone else, the stock takes on the value at which the recipient gets it, meaning neither the original owner nor the inheritor are taxed on those gains.

For very wealthy people, Marr said, that "wipes out a lifetime of tax liability."

Biden wants to do away with the step-up basis and he wants to tax capital gains for those making over $1 million at a rate equivalent to income.

"Broadly speaking, we know that there is more to be done to ensure that corporations, individuals who are at the highest income are paying more of their fair share," White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told The Washington Post in response to the ProPublica report. "Hence, it's in the president's proposals. His budget and part of how he's proposing to pay for his ideas will go ahead."

"The principle here is to equalize the treatment of ordinary income and capital gains, and that is a principle that's neither new or particularly novel," Brian Deese, the director of the National Economic Council, said in an April briefing. "In fact, the last president to enact a reform to equalize the treatment of ordinary income and capital gains was President Reagan, who did so while raising capital-gains taxes as part of the 1986 tax reform."

The White House did not respond to Insider's request for comment.

There's been GOP resistance to further alterations to the tax code following their 2017 tax cut, especially any increase in rates. But the new reporting already ramped up the tax debate within Congress on Tuesday.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill, "To the surprise of nobody I know, the rich and powerful aren't paying their fair share, what else is new?" He urged lawmakers to approve Biden's tax proposals.

"I do want people to understand the bottom line," Sen. Ron Wyden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, told reporters. "What ProPublica is revealing is, again, some of the country's wealthiest taxpayers [that] profited handsomely during the pandemic are not paying their fair share."

He said he's in the process of crafting a proposal to change that. Asked by Insider about the timeline of its introduction, Wyden responded: "I'll have it ready to go shortly."

"Often solutions to this are portrayed as radical, but what's radical is the current situation," Marr said. "What's radical is that wealthy people, a lot of their income never gets taxed. That's radical."

ARTICLE: The wealthiest Americans avoided billions in taxes by voluntarily doing something most only do out of necessity: borrowing money. by Tyler Sonnemaker

America's 25 wealthiest people got $401 billion richer from 2014 to 2018, according to Forbes.

ProPublica reported the income taxes they paid amounted to just 3.4% of that new net worth.

One way the ultra-rich avoid taxes: borrowing money at low-interest rates, according to ProPublica.

See more stories on Insider's business page.

ProPublica reported Tuesday it had obtained a massive trove of IRS documents, revealing that America's wealthiest individuals have avoided paying billions of dollars in taxes for years, resulting in income tax bills that amount to a fraction of their net worth.

One of the key strategies employed by the ultrawealthy to keep their tax bills low: borrowing money.

Many Americans borrow money only when they have to for large purchases like college tuition or a house, as interest can quickly add up, especially if they're not able to pay back the loan right away.

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But according to ProPublica and independent experts, America's billionaires have often financed their lavish lifestyles by using their vast fortunes as collateral for loans, which can come with single-digit interest rates.

Borrowing money allows the ultrawealthy to earn minuscule salaries, avoiding the 37% federal tax on top incomes, as well as avoid selling stock to free up cash, bypassing the 20% top capital gains tax rate. Since loans aren't considered taxable income, the wealthy need only pay back the principal and interest, rather than the higher taxes that would accompany multimillion-dollar incomes and investments.

America's 25 wealthiest individuals saw their net worth grow by $401 billion from 2014 to 2018, according to Forbes. But they paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes in that same period, amounting to 3.4% of that newly acquired wealth, ProPublica found.

By contrast, a middle-class American in their 40s who had amassed a "typical amount of wealth for people their age," saw their net worth grow by $65,000 from 2014 to 2018, but paid $62,000 in income taxes, or 95% of that new wealth, according to ProPublica.

The US does not directly tax individuals' total wealth, unlike some European countries. Nor does it tax stock holdings until they are sold. And billionaires tend to have a lot of their net worth wrapped up in stocks.

However, ProPublica's analysis revealed in new detail how America's tax code allows the ultrawealthy to take advantage of a litany of tax loopholes and wealth-management strategies to increase their wealth without also increasing their tax bills substantially.

To illustrate the gap between wealth and taxes paid by the ultrawealthy, ProPublica created what it called a "true tax rate." ProPublica defined this as the total federal income tax a person paid, in this case from 2014 to 2018, compared to how much new wealth they acquired in that same time period.

ProPublica did not publish its source data or disclose how it obtained IRS data.

According to ProPublica, the top 25 wealthiest Americans paid a "true tax rate" of 3.4% - a result of tax avoidance strategies that are out of reach for most Americans.

Borrowing, it turns out, is one of those strategies.

In 2014, for example, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison disclosed he had used 250 million of his Oracle shares as collateral to secure a $9.7 billion personal line of credit.

Elon Musk has similarly put up a massive amount of his equity in Tesla and SpaceX as collateral for loans, rather than sell those shares and pay 20% in capital gains tax to free up the money. From 2014 to 2018, Musk paid $455 million in taxes on a reported income of $1.52 billion, resulting in an effective tax rate of 29.9%. But his wealth grew by $13.9 billion during that time, meaning his "true tax rate," according to ProPublica's methodology, was just 3.27%.

Musk replied to ProPublica's request for comment with: "?"

Investor Carl Icahn also took advantage of borrowing money, paying $0 in federal income taxes despite reporting an adjusted gross income of $544 million, as he had an outstanding loan with Bank of America worth $1.2 billion, ProPublica reported.

"I didn't make money because, unfortunately for me, my interest was higher than my whole adjusted income," Icahn told ProPublica, adding that while he does borrow a lot of money, it's "not at all" meant to lower his tax bill, but rather that he borrows "to win. I enjoy the competition. I enjoy winning."