Chuck Collins, the great-grandson of Oscar Mayer, the cold-cut magnate, wrote a new book, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions, which focuses on the great lengths the super-rich go through to avoid taxes and keep their wealth in the family.
The New York Post reported that the book identifies what he dubbed as the lucrative “Wealth Defense Industry.” Collins, who the paper pointed out donated his $500,000 inheritance, said that about 90,000 professionals around the world have dedicated their lives to see to it that their wealthy employer pays as little as possible in taxes. As Collins told the paper,
“The wealth defenders are a booming sector of the white-collar workforce around the world… They are the gatekeepers—the lawyers and accountants with expertise in Trusts and Estates, tax law, incorporation, and business transactions. What the industry euphemistically calls ‘tax efficiency.’”
He also told the Post there are tens of thousands of people who “wake up every morning and say, ‘How can I help this billionaire pass as much money as possible to his children with the lowest taxes?’ That is their mission in life.”
The paper, citing the global Tax Justice Network, estimated in 2015, there was about $24 trillion to $32 trillion in hidden wealth—or 10 to 12 percent of the total wealth in the world.
The paper pointed to another report in the Wall Street Journal that said the IRS estimates the country’s 1 percent fail to report about 21 percent of their income to the IRS.
The paper also pointed out that companies like Apple file their patents overseas – owned by subsidiary corporations to enjoy “low or no taxes on royalty income from intellectual property.”
TREND FORECAST: When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, his three main pledges were to reduce taxes, build the wall stop immigrants from flooding into the U.S., and rebuild the nation’s rotting infrastructure.
The only promise he kept was to lower taxes… for the richest Americans. According to the Tax Policy Center, the 1 percent got almost 83 percent of the benefits from Trump’s 2017 tax bill. And, as we have detailed, rather than investing in capital expenditures, the mega-companies spent nearly $1 trillion of their tax breaks on stock buybacks… which, in turn, pushed the value of their equities higher.
We forecast there will be growing political movements against the 1 percent as the “Greatest Depression” worsens and incomes decline… while federal, state, and city taxes are raised on consumer goods and services, school and property, etc.
