Study: Super Wealthy Pay Just 3.4% in Taxes
A new ProPublica investigation reveals disturbing data about the world's richest people
(The world’s richest men like Bill Gates, seen here second from the right, next to longtime friend Jeffrey Epstein, and former US Treasury Secretary and Harvard University President Larry Summers, not only have more wealth than half the world’s population, but they also avoid taxes with their charitable organizations and investments)
A new ProPublica investigation has revealed that the 25 most wealthy Americans paid only about 3.4% in taxes, between 2014 and 2018. If that sounds bad to you, but not that bad because, after all, that’s just cherry-picking a measly 25 people, you might not realize how few people control all of the world’s wealth.
So, as a reminder, a 2017 Oxfam study showed that just eight individual men (six of them hailing from the good ‘ol US of A) have as much wealth as 50% of the world’s population. All that is to say that a few people have all of the money, and now we know that they’re also not even giving much back to us poors in the form of tax revenue, relative to their wealth.
The new ProPublica study shows that these oligarchs avoid fair taxation mostly by two broad means - using charitable donations to shield themselves from taxation, and having a lot of their wealth represented by investments, which aren’t always taxed like income. Read the entire study, here, and share it within your circle.