How the rich avoid taxes

The report by ProPublica about how the very rich pay almost no taxes shows the problem with the tax system that taxes income and not wealth. As a result, the wealthy use devices to massively increase their wealth with things like stock options and other assets that do not get taxed until they are sold and get converted into income. But we know that the wealthy live a lavish lifestyle. So where does that money come from? Don’t they have to sell assets to get money and thus be liable for taxes on that amount? Ha! Such things apply only to peons like us.
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Getting corporations to pay their share of taxes

I have written before about one method by which huge highly profitable corporations avoid taxes. The way it works is for a big company in the US (say) to buy a small company in a country that has favorable tax laws, Ireland being the current favored nation. They then ‘invert’ the relationship, claiming that the foreign company is the parent one while the US one is the subsidiary, even though nothing else has changed. This enables them to pay the lower taxes of the other nation while enjoying all the benefits of being in the US. This practice even has a name: ‘corporate perversion’.
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The ongoing war on the working class

Ronald Regan’s ‘welfare queen’ rhetoric propagated the myth that many Americans are lazy good-for-nothings who would take any opportunity to not work, a slander on working people that did not seem to hurt his popularity with the working class, perhaps because many people believes it to be true of other people, not themselves. The reason for pushing that myth was to justify cuts in benefits to the poor (“It is for their own good, so that they learn the value of work.”) in order to give tax cuts to the rich. Neoliberal Democrats like Bill Clinton also seized on it continue the cuts, in the name of ‘ending welfare as we know it’.
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An inside look at the awful working conditions in ‘fulfillment center’ warehouses

A recent episode of the radio show Radiolab had a story from seven years ago by an award winning writer and investigative reporter Gabriel Mac who managed to get hired at an internet retailer warehouse. The show is careful not to mention the name of the company where he was a ‘picker’ and worked in a giant warehouse that was the size of about 17 football fields, referring to it by the generic name of Amalgamated. He said that at the beginning of the day they are given these scanner devices that tell them where to locate an item on the shelves to put it in a plastic bag and place it on a conveyor belt. The items seem on the surface to be placed on the shelves at random with the same item scattered all over the warehouse and placed in bins with other unrelated items. But the seeming randomness is misleading. The computer knows where things are and they have been placed so as to make collecting the items ordered by customers quicker.
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Avoiding confronting capitalism’s predatory nature

When a social affliction affects only the poor or people of color, it tends to be either ignored or treated cursorily. But as soon as the same affliction hits white people, it suddenly becomes worthy of study by social scientists and lead to calls for finding solutions. We saw this with the drug epidemic. As long as the problem of drug abuse was seen as mainly in the black community in the form of marijuana or crack cocaine, the reaction was harsh policing and punitive jail sentences, leading to the massive overcrowding of prisons and the ruination of lives and families, not to mention the numerous killings of black men by police where the initial interaction was caused by the police stopping and searching them for drugs. But when the opioid epidemic hit that largely affected white people, we have seen more humane approaches being taken, with an understanding that drug use is more a health problem than a criminal problem.
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Trump’s predictions were all wrong

In Trump’s final days in office, he seemed to relish the idea that things would fall apart in the US after he was out of office. He must be seething that none of his dire warnings have come true.

In October 2020, he had warned that the stock market, the only economic indicator that he cares about, would crash if Biden were elected, wiping out people’s wealth. But that has not happened. The stock market keeps rising to record levels. This does not mean that most people are doing well, but just that the investor class and the very wealthy are doing just fine.
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The problem with cryptocurrencies

I know almost nothing about cryptocurrencies or the blockchain technology that undergirds it. I was aware that all transactions by currency holders are recorded on a distributed public ledger, which apparently is what is meant by a ‘blockchain’. I had been aware that these currencies, of which there are many in addition to the best known one of bitcoin, are not backed by any government like ‘real’ currencies are. Their value is maintained by having their production limited by having it ‘mined’, which is a metaphor for actions that are done by computers.

Elizabeth Kolbert writes about how this ‘mining’ works.
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Bankruptcy

For many ordinary people, declaring bankruptcy is a way to escape from crushing debt often caused by circumstances beyond their control, like health care bills, and start a new life, though it is never an easy out. In addition, they are made to feel ashamed for doing so. In 2005, the credit card companies lobbied for a new law that made made it much harder for individuals to declare bankruptcy. As a then senator, Joe Biden fought in favor of the new law, no doubt because his home state of Delaware is home to many credit card companies.

In yesterday’s episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver describes how the current bankruptcy laws are confusing and hard to maneuver and of a new proposal to simplify it. Of course Republicans will filibuster it.