STUDY: U.S. BILLIONAIRES ENRICH THEMSELVES THROUGH UNTAXED WEALTH

The wealth of the U.S.’s 735 billionaires has soared 62 percent in the last two years to $4.7 trillion, according to an 18 April report from nonprofit Oxfam America.
At the same time, American workers have earned about 10 percent more, much of which has been gobbled by inflation, the report noted.
Making matters worse, the median American family pays 14 percent of its income in federal income taxes, while the country’s 25 richest people paid income tax at a rate of 3.4 percent from 2014 through 2018, according to a study by ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative reporting project.
“We estimate that 36 percent of federal income taxes unpaid are owed by the top 1 percent and collecting all unpaid federal income tax from this group would increase federal revenues by about $175 billion annually,” ProPublica wrote.
However, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) audits households earning $25,000 or less annually at a rate five times higher than any other income group, a March analysis by the Transactional Records Clearinghouse found.
The IRS has called the skewed audit focus “not optimal” but has not changed its audit policy, the clearinghouse said.
A proposed global minimum corporate income tax, an idea championed by treasury secretary Janet Yellin, would collect another $63 billion for the U.S., which could support wider access to affordable health care and other public health needs, the Biden administration has said.
However, such a tax would require agreement among all countries in which multinational corporations do business. 
Currently, countries compete for jobs and businesses partly by undercutting each others’ income tax rates.
TRENDPOST: Aided by their hired politicians, the wealthy have been enriching themselves at the expense of the middle and lower class for decades. 
The tax cuts enacted during George W. Bush’s presidency shifted the burden of taxation away from upper-income, capital-owning households and toward the wage-earning households of the lower and middle classes, according to a study by the Brookings Institution.
After the Republican Congress passed its lopsided tax cut in 2017, Donald Trump famously told his compatriots at Mar-a-lago, “You all just got a lot richer.”
As long as the rich are able to pour money into political campaigns and PACs that protect their interests, the rich will continue to get richer, as we have documented in a series of articles:

• “Slavelandia: Rich Get Richer, Poor Get Poorer” (13 Oct 2020)

• “CEOs Get Richer as Profits Tank and Layoffs Soar” (4 May 2021)

• “COVID War Makes the Rich Richer” (29 June, 2021)

• “COVID War: Rich Got Richer, Poor Got Poorer” (21 Sep 2021)

• “Bigs Get Bigger, Rich Get Richer” (21 Oct 2021)
• “Slavelandia: 61 Percent of Americans Living Paycheck to Paycheck” (22 Feb 2022).