GOP Congress Has Made It Easier For Their Rich Friends To Evade Paying Taxes

The following is part of an article by economist Paul Krugman: 

Much of the rise of the modern American oligarchy has been driven by deliberate policy rather than technological or market forces. And that deliberate policy has been the decades-long dismantling of the system of progressive taxation — a system that had ended the Gilded Age, the last period of great inequality. Starting in the 1970s, right-wing politicians pushed through large reductions in effective tax rates on the wealthy. And in the 2010s, Republican-controlled congresses stripped the IRS of resources to enforce the tax code. These two changes set the stage for the reemergence of immense fortunes, with vast social and political consequences.

What exactly does a “reduction in effective tax rates” mean? Much of that change was implemented through reductions in the statutory rates. For example, the top federal tax bracket on individual incomes was more than 90% in the 1950s, versus 37% now. Large corporations paid a tax rate of 52% on their profits in the 1950s, which is now down to 21%. Large estates paid a 77% tax rate until 1976; now the rate is only 40%, and that only applies to the value in excess of $15 million.

However, beyond these reductions in statutory rates, tax avoidance and tax evasion have grown significantly. “Avoidance” and “evasion” may sound like synonyms, but they are not: avoidance involves exploiting loopholes in the tax code in ways that are legal, even if they shouldn’t be, while evasion involves breaking the law.

And tax evasion is now a very big concern. Reasonable estimates of the “tax gap” — taxes that individuals and businesses are legally obliged to pay, but don’t — are startlingly large — $600 billion a year or more – approximately 40% of the current budget deficit. Furthermore, much of this tax gap is surely accounted for by tax evasion by high-income Americans. So tax evasion is a significant contributor to both the rise of American oligarchy and the high federal debt.

Thus it is startling to realize that, except for a brief attempt to reduce the tax gap by the Biden administration, the U.S. government has over time reduced its efforts to ensure that the wealthy pay the taxes they owe. It’s clear that the purposeful reduction in the enforcement of the tax code for the wealthy is both a symptom as a well as a cause of America’s rising oligarchy. It is a key factor in America’s downward spiral into oligarchy, which is currently ravaging our politics and our democratic institutions.

Republicans Promised A Great Country For All - But Only Delivered It To The Rich

 

The following is just part of a post by Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report:

A new national survey of Americans finds that almost half of us (48%) say our lives are “lacking in fun” with fully 12% saying they can’t recall the last time they had an entire day they could simply enjoy. More than half (57%) said this was because they couldn’t afford to have fun, which makes perfect sense when you consider how 45 years of Reaganomics have destroyed the union movement and progressive taxation, and thus gutted the American middle class.

Like idiots, we Americans bought Reagan’s siren song hook, line, and sinker back in 1980. He told us prosperity would “trickle down” if we just abandoned the largely non-profit healthcare system we had nationwide (most states required hospitals and health insurance companies to be nonprofits), the unions that fought for us to have good pay and benefits, enforcement of anti-monopoly laws, free college, and subsidized housing.

Reagan put what’s sometimes called “the neoliberal agenda” (I wrote a book about it: The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America”) into place and no president, Republican or Democratic, has fully repealed it. We still have few union members, low taxes on billionaires and corporations, profitized healthcare and education, and stagnant wages for working class people.

All because we believed the Republicans and their billionaire backers and media owners. Consider how they’ve played three generations for fools:

Republicans told us if we just cut the top tax rate on the morbidly rich from the 74% it was at in 1980 down to 27% it would “trickle down” benefits to everybody else as, they said, the “job creators” would be unleashed on our economy.

Instead of a more general prosperity, we’ve now ended up with the greatest wealth and income inequality in the world, as over $70 trillion was transferred over 45 years from the bottom 90% to the top .1%, where it remains to this day. The middle class has gone from over 65% of us to fewer than half of us. It now takes 2 full-time wage earners to sustain the same lifestyle one could in 1980. . . .

Republicans told us that if we just stopped enforcing the anti-monopoly and anti-trust laws that had protected small businesses for nearly 100 years, there would be an explosion of innovation and opportunity as companies got bigger and better.

Instead, we’ve seen every industry in America become so consolidated that competition is dead, price gouging and profiteering reign, and it’s impossible to start or find small family-owned businesses anymore in downtowns, malls, and the suburbs. It’s all giant chains, many now owed by hedge funds or private equity. Few family or local businesses can compete against such giants.

Republicans told us that if we just changed the laws to let corporations pay their senior executives with stock (in addition to cash) they’d be “more invested” in the fate and future of the company and business would generally become healthier.

Instead, nearly every time a corporation initiates a stock buyback program, millions and often billions of dollars flow directly into the pockets of the main shareholders and executives while workers, the company, and society suffer the loss. . . .

Republicans told us we should hand our healthcare decisions not to our doctors but to bureaucratic insurance industry middlemen who’d would decide which of our doctor’s suggestions they’d approve and which they’d reject for payment. They said this will “lower costs and increase choice.”

In all of the entire developed world — all the OECD countries on 4 continents — there are only 500,000 medical bankruptcies a year. Every single one of them is here in America.

Republicans told us if we just got rid of our unions, then our bosses and the companies that employ them would give us better pay, more benefits, and real job security.

As everybody can see, they lied. And are working as hard as they can to prevent America from returning to the levels of unionization we had before Reagan’s Great Neoliberal Republican Experiment. . . .

The bottom line is that we — as a nation, voluntarily or involuntarily — have now had the full Republican experience, and every Zoomer paying attention knows it. It’s why they’re no longer listening to the Republican politicians who are continuing to try to sell us this bullshit.

We don’t want to hear Republicans sermonizing about deficits (that they themselves caused).

Or welfare (that they damaged and then exploited).

Or even whatever they’re calling “faith” these days, be it the death penalty, forcing raped women to give birth at the barrel of a gun, or burning books.

We’re over it, Republicans; we want fun and meaning back in our lives, rather than just working ourselves to death so Bezos and Zuck can buy new yachts.

Most Voters Still Don't Like Trump/GOP's "Big Beautiful Bill"

 

The charts above are from the Navigator Poll -- done between April 2nd and 6th of a nationwide sample of 1,000 registered voters, with a 3.1 point margin of error.

Trump Thinks He Can Control The Texas GOP Senate Nomination (But Paxton Says NO)

 

GOP Senators are scared of the results of the Texas primary elections, and have been begging Trump to endorse incumbent John Cornyn. It looks like they have convinced Trump to do so. But in his narcissistic glory, he wants to go further and demand that Cornyn's opponent drop out of the race. But Trump may not have the power he thinks he has. Ken Paxton is saying he'll stay in the race no matter who Trump endorses.

Trump Has A Huge Lead Over Haley In South Carolina

This chart is from the CBS News / YouGov Poll -- done between February 5th and 10th of 1,004 likely Republican voters in South Carolina, with a 4.4 point margin of error.
 

Final Pre-Caucus Poll Has Trump With A Huge Lead

The charts above are from The Des Moines Register / NBC News / Mediacom Poll -- done between January 7th and 12th of 705 registered Iowa voters likely to attend the GOP caucus, with a 3.7 point margin of error.

The Five Biggest Republican Lies About Immigration

With the GOP blunder banning abortion, the clownish year they spent controlling the House, and an improving economy, the Republicans are left with only one issue for the 2024 election -- immigration. And they are doing their best to scare voters by telling telling some outrageous lies about it.

Robert Reich gives us the five biggest lies about immigration that Republicans are telling:

Here are Trump Republicans’ five biggest lies about immigration, and the truth.

 

1. They claim Biden doesn’t want to stem illegal immigration and has created an “open border.”

Rubbish. Since he took office, Biden has consistently asked for additional funding for border control. 

Republicans have just as consistently refused. They’re voting to cut Customs and Border Protection funding in spending bills and blocking passage of Biden’s $106 billion national security supplemental that includes border funding. 

2. They blame the drug crisis on illegal immigration.

Last Wednesday, at the southern border in Texas, Republican House Speaker Michael Johnson claimed “America is at a breaking point with record levels of illegal immigration. We have lethal drugs that are pouring into our country at record levels.”

Rubbish. While large amounts of fentanyl and other deadly drugs have been flowing into the United States from Mexico, 90% arrives through official ports of entry, not via immigrants illegally crossing the border. In fact, research by the conservative Cato Institute found that more than 86% of the people convicted of trafficking fentanyl across the border in 2021 were U.S. citizens.

3. They claim that undocumented immigrants are terrorists.

Johnson also charged that “312 suspects on the terrorist watch list that have been apprehended — we have no idea how many terrorists have come into the country and set up terrorism cells across the nation.”

Baloney. America’s southern border has not been an entry point for terrorists. For almost a half-century, no American has been killed or injured in a terrorist attack in the United States that involved someone who crossed the border illegally. 

Johnson’s number comes from government data showing that from October 2020 to November 2023, 312 migrants — out of more than 6.2 million who crossed the southern border during these years — matched names on the terrorist watch list. It’s unclear how many were actual matches and whether the FBI considered them national security threats (the watch list includes family relations of terrorist suspects, many of whom are not considered to be involved in terrorist activity).

Republican Representative Mark Green, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said that FBI “Director Wray admitted before my committee the other day … that with the border wide open and a war in Israel, Hamas can just walk right in. That’s the director of the FBI. He fears for his own agents. It’s clear this is intentional.”

Alarmist rubbish. At that November 15 hearing, after Green asked Wray whether people on the terrorism watch list could be among those who entered the country without detection, Wray replied that there was no way to know. When Green then asked whether Wray could guarantee that Hamas wasn’t among them, Wray said, “What I can tell you is that our 56 joint terrorism task forces are working their tails off to make sure that they suss out and identify potential terrorist suspects, whether they’re on the watch list or not.”

4. They say undocumented immigrants are stealing American jobs.

Nonsense. Evidence shows immigrants are not taking jobs that American workers want. And the surge across the border is not increasing unemployment. Far from it: Unemployment has been below 4 percent for roughly two years, far lower than the long term average rate of 5.71 percent. It’s now 3.7 percent. 

5. They claim undocumented immigrants are responsible for more crime in America. 

More baloney. In fact, a 2020 study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, cited by the Department of Justice, showed that undocumented immigrants have “substantially” lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants. A recently published study in the American Economic Journal — analyzing official data from 2008 to 2017 on immigration, homicide, and victimization surveys — found “null effects” on crime from immigration.

 

Notwithstanding the recent surge in illegal immigration, America’s homicide rate has fallen nearly 13% since 2022 — the largest decrease on record. Local law enforcement agencies are also reporting drops in violent crime. . . .

Do we need to address our border situation? Yes — which Biden is trying to do. But we need to do so in a way that treats migrants as humans, not political pawns.

 

Trump and his enablers want us to forget that almost all of us are the descendants of immigrants who fled persecution, or were brought to America under duress, or simply sought better lives for themselves and their descendants.

Biden And Trump Maintain Large Leads In Their Primaries

 

The charts above reflect the results of the latest Quinnipiac University Poll -- done between December 14th and 18th. 683 Democratic voters were questioned (with a 3.8 point margin of error). 702 Republican voters were questioned (with a 3.7 point margin of error).