The real tax cheats

[Donnachaidh]

http://socialistworker.org/2011/04/18/the-real-tax-cheats

"WHEN GOVERNMENTS set tax rates, they are making decisions about who will prosper and by how much," argued David Cay Johnston in his groundbreaking book Perfectly Legal: The Secret Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and Cheat Everybody Else. Johnston, a former New York Times tax reporter, described the class character of the U.S. tax code as follows:

Congress lets business owners, investors and landlords play by one set of rules, which are filled with opportunities to hide income, fabricate deductions and reduce taxes. Congress requires wage earners to operate under another, much harsher set of rules in which every dollar of income from a job, a savings account or a stock dividend is reported to the government, and taxes are withheld from each paycheck to make sure wage earners pay in full.

As the April 7 Bloomberg BusinessWeek cover story noted bluntly, "The more you make, the less you pay" in U.S. taxes. The story offers "A Billionaire's Guide to Paying No Taxes," providing a list of "11 shelters, dodges and rolls--all perfectly legal--used by America's wealthiest people."

These tax breaks are not available to those who file their taxes on Turbotax.com, much less to those who fill out their 1040 short forms themselves, but only to members of the corporate class, who employ an army of tax lawyers and lobbyists to exploit each and every loophole in the 67,000 pages that make up the U.S. tax code.

More at the link --