Biden’s Build Back Better: IRS Audits for Working Class, Tax Cuts for the Rich JOHN BINDER
President Joe Biden and Democrats are hoping to squeeze an extra $200 billion in tax revenue out of American taxpayers by mostly targeting working and middle class households with Internal Revenue Service (IRS) audits.
As part of Biden’s “Build Back Better Act,” which was already passed by House Democrats, nearly 600,000 more working and middle class Americans earning $75,000 or less a year would be audited by the IRS, an analysis by Republican lawmakers reveals.
“Democrats’ tax and spending spree will more than double Americans’ chances of being audited as it targets lower and middle-income earners,” the analysis states:
The proposal will lead to an additional 1.2 million IRS audits each year, nearly half of which will hit middle class families making less than $75,000 . All this so Democrats can wring an extra $200 billion out of the American people, particularly from middle class families and small businesses. [Emphasis added]
Biden’s plan to supercharge the IRS with $80 billion in mandatory funding and 87,000 new IRS agents will lead to drastically higher audit rates for all Americans at every income level according to the Congressional Budget Office. [Emphasis added]
Specifically, more than 583,000 of the new IRS audits will target working and middle class Americans earning $75,000 or less. Of those 583,000 new IRS audits, more than 313,000 would target the poorest of Americans who earn $25,000 or less a year.
In addition, Biden’s Build Back Better Act will “mean more than 800,000 more federal tax liens on taxpayer property such as homes and vehicles,” the analysis states.
Also, because the majority of underreported income to the IRS is from those earning $0 to $200,000 a year, the plan will mean more targeting of not only working and middle class Americans but also small businesses.
“The Biden plan will mean more audits of the middle class and lower-income Americans, 800,000 more federal tax liens per year, and more IRS shakedowns of American families and small businesses,” the analysis states.
At the same time, Biden’s Build Back Better Act would provide a $625 billion tax cut for the wealthiest Americans living in blue states — paid for by working and middle class Americans — as a result of an increase in the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap.
The plan gives a tax cut to 66 percent of Americans earning more than $1 million annually while 78 percent of Americans earning $500,000 to $1 million will get a tax cut. Meanwhile, just 27 percent of Americans earning $75,000 to $100,000 would see a tax increase along with 19 percent of Americans earning $50,000 to $75,000.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here .
This is because despite all its declarations, the Democratic Party is not a party of workers. It, as Biden’s transition team attests, is a party of Wall Street, big banks, Amazon, and the military-industrial complex.
Inside Jeff Bezos Mansions
Jeff Bezos' $400 Million Flying Fox Yacht https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRYEcushHjc
Inside Jeff Bezos' $21,000,000 Car Collection https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu-Vy9Q6U4A
Chuck Schumer Pushes Tax Cut for Richest 1% in Coronavirus Relief Bill JOEL B. POLLAK
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is pushing for a repeal of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction cap in the next round of coronavirus relief — giving a tax cut to the wealthiest 1% of taxpayers, especially in “blue” states.
In his landmark tax reform law, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, President Donald Trump and the Republicans offset some of the revenue losses from low tax rates by restricting deductions. The law capped the SALT deduction at $10,000.
Previously, those taxpayers wealthy enough to file a list of itemized deductions could count all of the taxes they paid to state and local governments toward a deduction in their federal tax liability. That meant wealthy taxpayers in the most heavily taxed states — primarily run by Democrats — benefited most. The SALT deduction also gave Democrats political room to raise taxes higher, because it made rich taxpayers less likely to resist: they could claim some of the money back.
Trump ended the deduction — at some political cost to himself. Republicans went on to lose congressional seats in wealthy suburbs in high-tax Democrat-run states. Orange County, California, for example, flipped entirely to Democrats.
But Democrats still want to repeal the SALT cap, regardless, because they want their state and local governments to avoid tax cut — and because their wealthy campaign contributors want to be subsidized, once again, by the rest of the country.
Even Seth Hanlon, a former Obama administration official who is now a senior fellow at the left-wing Center for American Progress, has protested against Schumer’s idea, noting that repealing the SALT cap would help “the top 1%.”
Come on, not this again.
Repealing the SALT cap for 2020-21 would be a $137 billion tax cut, with about 63% going to the top 1%.
It does nothing for states and localities except potentially crowd out the actual fiscal relief they urgently need. https://t.co/jlSjIhnzpq
— Seth Hanlon (@SethHanlon) July 15, 2020
Here is the national distribution of the tax cut from repealing the SALT cap, via @iteptweets .
A tiny percentage of middle-income people get any benefit.
The top 1% gets 63%: an avg. $35k tax cut for them.
The top 5% gets 87%.
The bottom 80% get literally 1% of the benefit. pic.twitter.com/8EIav7wgcJ
— Seth Hanlon (@SethHanlon) July 15, 2020
Here is the distribution just for New York. Largely the same story. A few more middle-income people benefit a little compared to nationwide, but still, the tax cut goes overwhelmingly to top one-percenters. Not the people most affected by COVID!!! pic.twitter.com/Dp0evxq3P7
— Seth Hanlon (@SethHanlon) July 15, 2020
The basic story is the same in every state. State by state estimates are here. https://t.co/1KREhnb6et
— Seth Hanlon (@SethHanlon) July 15, 2020
The Democrat-run House of Representatives has already passed a repeal on the SALT cap that would be effective for two years.
According to The Hill , “Schumer urged Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) [on Tuesday] to ‘join the House, and join the Democrats in the Senate, and get rid of that cap.'”
Schumer also vowed to make the SALT deduction — the effective tax cut for the 1% — permanent: “If I become majority leader, one of the first things I will do is we will eliminate it forever,” he added, according to The Hill . “It will be dead, gone and buried.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER , tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak .
House Democrats pass stripped-down social welfare bill with massive tax cut for the rich Barry Grey
On Friday morning, the House of Representatives passed its version of President Joe Biden’s $1.75 trillion “Build Back Better” social welfare and climate bill. As expected, the measure was approved on a party-line vote, with 220 Democrats voting “Yes” and all 212 Republicans voting “No.” One Democrat, Jared Golden of Maine, a conservative former Marine who served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, broke ranks and voted in opposition to the bill.
Golden had announced that he would oppose the bill because it included a massive tax break for the wealthy. The outcome of months of internal Democratic Party wrangling was the decision of the Biden White House and the party leadership to strip the bill of all major tax increases opposed by big business and slash the top line figure for social programs and climate protection in half, from $3.25 trillion to $1.75 trillion over 10 years.
That, however, did not satisfy the Wall Street and corporate interests that dictate government policy and control both major parties. Earlier this month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi incorporated into the bill a measure demanded by wealthy donors in high-tax states such as New York, New Jersey and California. It was the lifting of a $10,000 cap on deductions on federal income taxes to compensate for state and local taxes. The cap was imposed as part of the Trump tax bill passed in December of 2017, which slashed taxes for corporations and the wealthy.
Until then, there was no limit on the amount of federal tax deductions for state and local taxes that wealthy people in generally pro-Democratic high-tax states could claim by itemizing their federal tax returns. In imposing the limit, Trump and the Republicans were targeting states that historically vote “blue” in federal elections.
This infuriated the Democrats’ wealthy backers, who demanded that the Biden budget bill raise the limit on so-called SALT (state and local tax) deductions. The Democrats acceded by adding to the bill a provision raising the limit to $80,000 for each of the next nine years.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this tax windfall for the wealthy will cost the federal government $285 billion over the 10-year span covered by the bill, making it the second most costly item in the legislation. It is topped only by a combined $390 billion for universal pre-school for three- and four-year-old children and limited subsidies for child care.
It is considerably higher than the allocation for clean energy and climate resilience ($220 billion), four weeks of paid family and medical leave ($195 billion), clean energy and electricity tax credits ($190 billion), affordable housing ($170 billion), Medicaid home- and community-based services ($150 billion), a one-year extension of the expanded child tax credit ($130 billion), and tax credits for health insurance premiums under Obamacare ($125 billion).
It would help pay for programs that were severely cut or dropped outright from the bill under pressure from big business and its most open mouthpieces in the Democratic Party, such as senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. These include free community college (eliminated); the ability of Medicare to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry, thereby lowering their costs (reduced to a shell program affecting only a handful of drugs and not even starting until 2024); and Medicare coverage for dental, hearing and vision (reduced to limited subsidies for hearing aids).
According to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, the SALT tax provision will overwhelmingly benefit the top 10 percent of income earners, with virtually nothing going to the remaining 90 percent, i.e., the working class and lower-middle class. The measure will particularly benefit the top one percent, those who make over $867,000 a year. They will see a tax cut in the tens of thousands of dollars.
“Anything you do to eliminate the SALT cap is going to be regressive, because that tax is overwhelmingly paid by very high-income people,” said Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center. “Anything you do to lower that tax doesn’t matter for most people.”
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) reported that a family of four in Washington D.C. making $1 million per year would receive 10 times as much tax relief next year from expanding the state and local tax deductions as a middle-class family would receive from an expansion of the child tax credit. The CRFB said that two-thirds of households making more than $1 million a year would get a tax cut under the legislation because of the increase in the state and local property tax deduction.
Pointing to the brazen hypocrisy of Biden and the Democratic Party, Marx Goldwein, senior policy director at the CRFB, said, “We’re debating about whether to give lower- and middle-class families a thousand dollars more a year through the child tax credit, while giving upper-class families $10,000 or more through SALT. That’s counter to everything the Democrats have been saying Build Back Better is about and everything they said about the Trump tax cuts.”
According to a report from the Tax Foundation, raising the SALT cap would more than offset other tax increases for the wealthy in 2022 included in the House bill. These include a 15 percent minimum corporate tax, a 1 percent tax on stock buybacks, increased taxes on US companies’ foreign profits, and a surtax of 5 percent on those with adjusted gross income over $10 million and 8 percent on those making more than $25 million.
In a column in the Financial Times on Thursday, Edward Luce alluded to the Democrats’ obsession with identity politics and linked it to the Build Back Better bill:
The result is a bill that caters best to the most powerful slice of Americans—the very wealthy. They can sleep easy now that the carried interest loophole, which allows private equity partners to be taxed at lower than ordinary income rates—as Warren Buffett pointed out, they pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries—is probably safe. As it stands, the bill will also give wealthy Americans a bigger tax cut than they got from Trump’s big 2017 tax bill.
Even this miserable travesty of social reform will be further gutted if not blocked outright in the Senate, where passage will require the support of all 50 Democrats. Neither Manchin nor Sinema has signed on to the bill, the former having declared his opposition to even a completely inadequate a four-week paid leave provision, while calling for means testing and work requirements for other social benefits.
The so-called “progressives”—Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren in the Senate, the more than 100-strong House Progressive Caucus—capitulated to the demand of Biden and the most right-wing factions in the Democratic caucuses to pass the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. This bill was backed by virtually every corporate lobby group, without having secured the agreement of Manchin and Sinema to support Senate passage of the broader “Build Back Better” social spending bill, against which the corporations have waged a massive lobbying campaign.
Sanders, for his part, has denounced the inclusion of the SALT provision in the House bill but is supporting a modified version in the Senate bill, according to which eligibility for expanded tax deductions would be limited to people making less than $400,000 a year. On the other hand, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, widely known as the “senator from Wall Street,” is supporting an even bigger deduction than that provided by the House.
He has announced that he will bring up the National Defense Authorization Act, which allocates $778 billion for the military in a single year (nearly half the 10-year Build Back Better budget) and the anti-China United States Innovation and Competition Act before taking up the social/climate measure passed by the House. This could delay consideration of Build Back Better until next year, something Manchin has hinted at, likely killing the legislation.
All of the so-called “progressives” promoted by the pseudo-left, including Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Ilhan Omar and Cori Bush, voted for the House bill on Friday, demonstrating the DSA’s role as an arm of one of the two main parties of US imperialism.
During the 2020 Democratic primaries, every candidate pledged to repeal the Trump tax cut for the rich. Biden has repeatedly called his domestic agenda a “blue collar” program. While declaring ad nauseam that “I am a capitalist,” who has nothing against people becoming billionaires, he has called on Wall Street to “pay their fair share.”
Now it is perfectly clear what this actually means. Under conditions where the Democrats control the White House and both houses of Congress, they have dropped any attempt to raise corporate or personal income tax rates for the wealthy The only significant change Biden and the Democrats are seeking to make to Trump’s multitrillion-dollar tax giveaway to the oligarchy is to increase its scale.
This is a devastating exposure of the fraudulent claims of the DSA and similar organizations of the upper-middle class that progressive change is possible within the framework of the capitalist two-party system and that the Democratic Party can serve as an instrument of social change.
Wolff Responds: Capitalism's False Defenses
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjHch15JHVg
Ten Years Ago: Corporate & Household Debt [10th Anniversary of Economic Update with Richard Wolff] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8xf0J7X2gI
CEO RESIGNATIONS INCREASE, ECONOMIC COLLAPSE GAINS SPEED, YOU CAN'T PRINT\ PROSPERITY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w3uCSeZEGk
Insiders Just Exposed That A Terrifying Stock Market Crash Forecast Is About To Co
After considerable toing and froing within the administration, US President Joe Biden has decided to renominate Jerome Powell for another four-year term as chairman of the US Federal Reserve.
But when Wall Street cracked the whip, Powell rapidly reversed course.
Having boosted the stock market to record highs by pouring trillions of dollars into the financial system over his term, including $4.5 trillion in response to the March 2020 financial crisis, Powell had strong support on Wall Street with gushing praise for his management of the pandemic crisis.
He also received bipartisan support for his role, including from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen who made clear her support for Powell’s reappointment some months ago.
But there was opposition to Powell, a Republican initially appointed by Trump, from the so-called “left” of the Democratic party on the grounds he had eased bank regulations imposed in response to the 2008 crisis and was not sufficiently attuned to the issue of climate change.
Last month Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren labelled Powell a “dangerous man” to lead the Fed.
Powell was also under something of a cloud because of a scandal which emerged in September involving members of the Fed’s governing body who were found to be active investors last year as the Fed was propping up the market.
Their preferred candidate was Lael Brainard, who was regarded as stronger on regulation. On the issue of monetary policy, however, Brainard has supported all the actions taken by the Fed chair and is regarded, in words of the Financial Times (FT), as “mildly more dovish than Powell.”
In the event, Biden sought to have a bet each away, appointing Powell to the top post while elevating Brainard to the post of vice-chair, creating the “impression of continuity in monetary policy with a more robust approach to regulation” as the FT put it.
In his remarks on the decision to reappoint Powell, Biden gave a nod to the Democratic “left,” saying Powell had told him he would make accelerating the Fed’s efforts to address the risks posed to the financial system by climate change a priority.
Biden said Powell had also underscored the importance of making sure that “our financial regulations are staying ahead of emerging risks be they from innovations and cryptocurrency or the practices of less regulated nonbank financial institutions.”
Warren repeated her opposition to Powell’s renomination as did two other Democrat senators. But the appointment is expected to pass the Senate easily with broad support from both parties.
This is because of the massive expansion of the Fed’s intervention into the financial system to prop it up after the Treasury market froze in March 2020, threatening a full-scale collapse on an even greater scale than 2008.
The Fed conducted this intervention on the grounds that it was necessary to defend jobs and help prop up the labour market. But Powell’s record shows his policies are directed to sustaining the stock market where speculation, funded by cheap money provided by the Fed, has driven it to record heights.
In 2018, the Fed had started to lift interest rates in order to try to restore more “normal” monetary policy. But when Wall Street cracked the whip, Powell rapidly reversed course. After a significant market downturn in December 2018, he promised to end interest rate rises in January 2019 and then cut interest rates in the middle of the year, well before the pandemic struck.
In August last year, amid the signs of rising inflation, Powell initiated a major shift in Fed policy. It would no longer seek to keep inflation to 2 percent but allow it to rise above that level in order to maintain an average 2 percent rate over time.
According to Powell, it would not move to lift rates when the unemployment had reached low levels—the procedure adopted in the past—and this decision reflected “appreciation for the benefits of a strong labour market, particularly for many in low- and moderate-income communities.”
As the founding American Trotskyist James P. Cannon once remarked, there is always a “good reason” and then there is the real one. In this case the real reason for the policy shift was to assure Wall Street the Fed would not cut off the supply of money that has enabled the multi-billionaire Wall Street oligarchs to rake in money hand over fist during the pandemic.
As inflation started to rise, Powell, maintained it was “transitory”—another assurance to Wall Street that interest rates would not be lifted immediately.
But with inflation going above 5 percent for the past several months, reaching an annual rate of more than 6 percent in October, this claim has become impossible to maintain.
The Fed responded at its last meeting by deciding to taper its monthly purchases of $120 billion of financial assets—US Treasury bonds and mortgaged-backed securities—by $15 billion, ending them completely by next June.
In announcing the decision, Powell assured the markets this did not mean interest rates would soon be lifted.
But this course is now under fire and there is a growing chorus of criticism that the Fed is moving far too slowly in the face of rising prices.
Former US treasury secretary Lawrence Summers started the campaign warning several months ago of the danger of an inflationary spiral like that of the 1970s and has since been joined by others.
Last week the chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, Jason Furman, said the stance of monetary policy should move “in a less expansionary direction.”
“While the Fed has raised rates too much too soon in the past, this alternative timing may result in the opposite error,” he wrote.
The Fed is caught on the horns of a significant dilemma. On the one hand, it fears that moves to lift interest rates will set off a major crisis in financial markets which have become totally dependent on the supply of ultra-cheap money used to finance increasingly risky bets and the orgy of speculation in so-called “assets” such as cryptocurrencies.
On the other, it fears the rising tide of class struggle as workers strive, in what is taking the form of a rebellion against the suppression of the trade union bureaucracies, to win back the wages they have lost during the pandemic and in the decades that preceded it.
In a tweet on the news earlier this month that John Deere had been forced to restore cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) stolen from workers in 2015, Summers pointed to the wages as the key issue.
“Those serene about inflation should ponder the fact that the new John Deere contract has reinstated previously dropped cost-of-living allowances,” he wrote.
An editorial in the Wall Street Journal raised the same issue, saying the restoration of COLA should be “an alarm bell for the Fed” and the longer inflation remained higher the more workers would demand the same.
Speaking on his announcement that he would reappoint Powell, Biden said there was “enormous uncertainty for our economy.”
Powell responded by declaring that the Fed would “use our tools both to support the economy and a strong labour market, and to prevent higher inflation from becoming entrenched” while “vigilantly guarding the resilience and stability of the financial system.”
The problem for Powell in his second term is that these goals are inherently contradictory. The Fed is being driven to tighten monetary policy to contain the growing wages movement sparked by inflation, but at the same time, such is the extent of indebtedness in the financial system, that moves in that direction could see a collapse in asset valuations, both on the stock market and more broadly.
Inside Jeff Bezos Mansions
Jeff Bezos' $400 Million Flying Fox Yacht https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRYEcushHjc
Inside Jeff Bezos' $21,000,000 Car Collection https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu-Vy9Q6U4A
IRS data shows: US billionaires’ true tax rate far lower than that of workers
Jacob Crosse
On June 8, ProPublica published the first in a projected series of articles documenting the massive scale of legally sanctioned tax evasion carried out by America’s ever-expanding class of billionaires. The article, based on an exhaustive study of leaked Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents, focuses on the period from 2014 through 2018. It demonstrates that in the course of those five years, the 25 richest Americans paid federal taxes on their increased wealth at a far lower rate than the typical US household.
The report also cites tax data on billionaire oligarchs such as Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk and Michael Bloomberg going back to the first decade of the current century, showing that they paid little or no taxes regardless of which big business party—Democrats or Republicans—occupied the White House. It explains as well that even were the Biden administration to carry out its promised increases in income tax rates for the rich, the impact on the vast fortunes of today’s robber barons would be minimal.
The authors state that in determining the increased wealth of America’s “top 0.001 percent,” they included not simply their salaries, which in many cases comprise only a small share of their actual income, but also “investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits.”
The result, they note, demolishes “the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most.” They continue: “The IRS records show that the wealthiest can—perfectly legally—pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.”
ProPublica’s revelations provide insight into how the capitalist system and its various state institutions and rigged legal system promote a parasitic financial aristocracy that lives in a world apart from the rest of humanity. Unlike workers, who depend on their wages to survive and pay the full income tax rate, the ultra-wealthy avoid taxes by obtaining massive loans from banks, borrowing against the value of their ever growing and artificially inflated assets, such as stocks and real estate, which are not taxable until they are sold.
In order to calculate what ProPublica terms the “true tax rate” of the 25 richest Americans, the report compares how much in taxes these individuals paid over a given period to how much their wealth grew, using wealth estimates published by Forbes magazine.
Between 2014 and 2018, Forbes estimated that these 25 people saw their wealth increase collectively by $401 billion. The documents obtained by ProPublica show that these same individuals collectively paid $13.6 billion in federal income taxes over the same time period, for a true tax rate of only 3.4 percent. By contrast, ProPublica found that between 2014 and 2018, a typical US worker in his or her 40s experienced a net wealth expansion of about $65,000. That same worker’s tax bills “were almost as much, nearly $62,000, over that five-year period.”
Over that same period, according to ProPublica, Warren Buffett’s wealth increased by $24.3 billion, but the Berkshire Hathaway mogul paid only $23.7 million in taxes, resulting in a true tax rate of 0.10 percent.
Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’ wealth soared by a staggering $99 billion, but he paid just $973 million in taxes, yielding a true tax rate of less than 1 percent.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is another “pandemic profiteer.” He saw his wealth skyrocket this past year, in part by violating a state-ordered shutdown and illegally restarting production at the Fremont, California , Tesla factory, leading to hundreds of coronavirus infections. Between 2014 and 2018 his wealth grew by $13.9 billion, while he paid $455 million in taxes, resulting in a true tax rate of 3.27 percent.
The reporting confirms the Marxist analysis of the capitalist state, described in the Communist Manifesto as “… a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” The various loopholes and tax avoidance schemes employed by the ruling class are legal, have been for decades, and will continue to be so under Biden or any other Democratic administration.
As then-candidate Joe Biden assured wealthy donors at a Manhattan campaign fundraising event in January 2019, should he become president, “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.” Nearly six months into his presidency, Biden has kept his promises to his wealthy benefactors, as evinced by his recent retreat from his proposal to raise corporate taxes by a few percentage points.
Among other facts included in the ProPublica report:
· Bezos, the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes in 2007 and 2011. In 2011, despite his overall wealth holding steady at $18 billion, Bezos filed a tax return in which he claimed to have lost money. The IRS not only approved the billionaire’s tax return, it granted him a $4,000 tax credit for his children!
· Musk, now the second richest person in the world, did not pay any federal income taxes in 2018.
· Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as billionaire investors Carl Icahn and George Soros, have also had years when they paid nothing in federal income taxes. Soros, worth an estimated $8.6 billion as of March 2021, paid no federal income taxes for three years in a row.
According to the ProPublica report, when the super-rich do pay something in income taxes, their true tax rate is far lower than that of the typical working class household, with a median income of $70,000. For instance, between 2006 and 2018, while Bezos’ wealth surged by over $120 billion, he paid, on average, $1.09 in taxes for every $100 in wealth growth. But over the same period, the median American household paid $160 in taxes for every $100 in wealth growth—paying more in taxes than it gained in wealth.
Overall, ProPublica found that the richest 25 Americans pay a far lower income tax rate, an average of 15.8 percent of adjusted gross income, than do many workers, once taxes for Social Security and Medicare are included. To highlight the point, ProPublica found that by the end of 2018, the 25 richest Americans were worth $1.1 trillion and collectively paid a federal tax bill of $1.9 billion.
The $1.1 trillion in collective wealth hoarded by 25 people equals the combined annual wages of roughly 14.3 million American workers, who in 2018 paid $143 billion in federal taxes, or over 75 times more than the billionaires.
On Tuesday, in response to a reporter’s question about the ProPublica report, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki had nothing to say about its damning content. Instead, she threatened criminal prosecution of those who leaked the IRS documents to ProPublica.
“Any unauthorized disclosure of confidential government information by a person of access is illegal and we take this very seriously,” said Psaki. She added that the IRS commissioner has referred the matter to investigators and that the FBI and Justice Department would also be investigating.
Joe Biden, Democrats Seek $625 Billion Tax Cut for Wealthy Coastal Elites JOHN BINDER
President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better Act,” a filibuster-proof $1.75 trillion budget reconciliation package, gives $625 billion in tax cuts to the nation’s wealthiest blue state residents.
Slipped into the reconciliation package are hundreds of billions of dollars worth of tax cuts for the Democrat Party’s wealthiest donors, that would be paid for by America’s working and middle class.
A newly released analysis of Biden’s budget finds that plans to increase the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap from its current $10,000 to $80,000 would effectively amount to a $625 billion tax for the wealthiest of Americans living in blue states.
The analysis reveals that “a household making $1 million per year will receive ten times as much from SALT cap relief as a middle-class family will receive from the child tax credit expansion.”
Democrats Push for Massive Tax Cut for the Richest, Brookings Says https://www.theepochtimes.com/democrats-push-for-massive-tax-cut-for-the-richest-says-brookings_3494101.html?ref=brief_News&utm_source=morningbriefnoe&utm_medium=email
BY EMEL AKAN
WASHINGTON— Democrats are pushing to lift the cap on the federal tax deduction for state and local taxes (SALT), but a Brookings Institution study says this would be a handout to the rich.
“Lifting the cap on the SALT deduction would massively favor the rich, with most of the benefit going to the top 1 percent,” Richard Reeves and Christopher Pulliam from the Brookings Institution wrote in a recent report .
House Democrats passed the $3 trillion HEROES Act in May. Buried in the 1,815-page relief bill is a provision that would eliminate the limitation on the SALT deduction for 2020 and 2021.
Democrats argue that lifting the cap would provide relief to people hit hardest by the virus, especially in devastated cities such as New York.
Under the old tax code, individuals who itemized their deductions were able to deduct all their SALT against their federal taxable income. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), however, limited individual’s deduction for SALT payments to $10,000 a year ($5,000 for a married person filing a separate return). Any state and local individual income or property tax payments in excess of that amount are no longer deductible by individual taxpayers.
Blue state Democrats believe the SALT cap is unfair to their residents. Blue states, especially those with higher individual income and property tax rates, objected to this cap and even tried to create tax maneuvers to avoid this limitation.
Republicans, on the other hand, argue that the SALT deduction mostly benefits wealthy individuals and is unfair to residents in lower-tax states. They argue that lifting the SALT cap forces people in low-tax states such as Tennessee and Texas to subsidize high-tax states such as California and New York.
“The main argument from some on the political left for the SALT deduction is that it encourages states to spend more by making it easier for them to tax more,” the Brookings report said.
“But if the goal is for the federal government to provide additional support to state and local governments, far better to do so directly, rather than by the roundabout route of offering a tax break to the rich.”
Almost all benefits of repealing the $10,000 SALT cap would go to the top quintile, with the top 1 percent getting an average tax cut of $33,100 and 0.1 percent receiving nearly $145,000, according to Tax Policy Center estimates.
Lifting the SALT cap would give essentially no benefit to the middle class, contrary to what Democrats have argued. Only 4 percent of the benefit would go the middle class, “for an average annual tax cut of a little less than $27,” the report stated.
However, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in July that he would make it a priority to permanently remove the SALT deduction cap if Democrats win the Senate majority in 2020.
“I want to tell you this: If I become majority leader, one of the first things I will do is we will eliminate it forever,” he said during a press conference. “It will be dead, gone, and buried.”
Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and Joe Biden’s presidential campaign didn’t immediately respond to requests by The Epoch Times for comment.
“At best, the SALT deduction is a warped way to do social policy; at worst, it is a politically-motivated handout to the richest people in the richest places,” the report stated.
“Rather than seeking to remove the cap on the deduction, policymakers would do better to consider steps towards the removal of the deduction itself.”
The U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration predicted in 2019 that the SALT cap would prevent nearly 11 million taxpayers from deducting $323 billion in state and local tax payments from their federal tax returns.
“Most of the benefits of the TCJA went to the top fifth, and 20 percent went to the top 1 percent. But lifting the SALT cap would be much more favorable to the rich—with almost three times as much of the benefit going to the top one percent,” the report stated.
Follow Emel on Twitter: @mlakan
Watchdog Accuses Silicon Valley Giants of Dodging $100 Billion in Taxes AFP Photo/Alex Wong
LUCAS NOLAN
Six of the Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe have been accused of dodging $100 billion in taxes by a British tax watchdog.
CNBC reports that six major Silicon Valley tech firms have been accused of having a combined “tax gap” of $100 billion over the past ten years according to an analysis by a British tax organization. Fair Tax Mark, a British organization that certifies businesses for proper tax conduct, examined the global tax payments of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, and Microsoft from 2010 to 2019.
The research analyzed the company’s 10-K filings submitted to the U.S. government by the tech giants. Fair Tax Mark looked at tax provisions, which is the amount that companies set aside in their financial reports to pay taxes, and compared these with the amount of money that the companies actually paid to the government, called cash taxes. Researchers found that over the past ten years, the gap between the tax provision set out by the tech firms and the taxes they actually paid was approximately $100.2 billion.
The report also claimed that the profits were “shifted to tax havens, especially Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.” The researchers noted that most of the tax shortfall “almost certainly arose outside the United States,” with tax charges from countries outside the United States coming to 8.4 percent of the companies’ profits overseas.
Paul Monaghan, CEO of Fair Tax Mark, discussed the report with CNBC stating: “The amount of tax being paid by these businesses is $100 billion less than reported in their accounts.” The report noted that Amazon was the worst offender of the six tech firms. The report alleged that Amazon paid $3.4 billion in income taxes since 2010, noting that the cash tax paid by Amazon amounted to 12.7 percent of its profit for the decade despite the corporate tax rate being set at 35 percent for seven of the past ten years. President Donald Trump cut the corporate tax rate to 21 percent in 2017.
The report stated: “The company is growing its market domination across the globe on the back of revenues that are largely untaxed and can unfairly undercut local businesses that take a more responsible approach.” A spokesperson for Amazon told CNBC in a statement:
Amazon represents about 1% of global retail, with larger competitors everywhere we operate, and had a 24% effective tax rate on profits from 2010-2018. Amazon is primarily a retailer where profit margins are low, so comparisons to technology companies with operating profit margins of closer to 50% is not rational. Governments write the tax laws and Amazon is doing the very thing they encourage companies to do — paying all taxes due while also investing many billions in creating jobs and infrastructure. Coupled with low margins, this investment will naturally result in a lower cash tax rate.
Facebook had the second-biggest tax gap with the cash tax it paid representing 10.2 percent of the profit it made over the decade. A spokesperson for Facebook told CNBC:
In 2018 we paid $3.8 billion in corporation tax globally and our effective tax rate over the last five years is more than 20%. Under current rules we pay the vast majority of the tax we owe in the U.S. as that is where the bulk of our functions, assets and risks are located. Ultimately these are decisions for governments and we support the OECD process which is looking at new international tax rules for the digital economy.
Google ranked third with its taxes amounting to 15.8 percent of its profits with its foreign tax charge amounting to 7.1 percent. A Google spokesperson told CNBC that the report form Fair Tax Mark “ignores the reality of today’s complicated international tax system and distorts the facts documented in our regulatory filings.”
The company added: “Like other multinational companies, we pay the vast majority — more than 80% — of our corporate income tax in our home country. As we have said before, we strongly support the OECD’s work to end the current uncertainty and develop new tax principles.”
Netflix ranked fourth in the list handing over 15.8 percent of its profit while Apple ranked fifth with a tax rate of 17.1 percent. Apple told CNBC in a statement:
As the largest taxpayer in the world, we know the important role tax payments play in society. We pay all that we owe according to tax laws and local customs wherever we operate, and since 2008 Apple’s corporate taxes alone have totaled over $100 billion.
Microsoft paid the highest tax rate of 16.8 percent with a spokesperson telling CNBC: “Microsoft is fully compliant with all local laws and regulations in every country in which we operate. We serve customers in countries all over the world and our tax structure reflects that global footprint.”
Read more about the report at CNBC here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
CON MAN JOE FROM SCRANTON
During the 2020 Democratic primaries, every candidate pledged
to repeal the Trump tax cut for the rich. Biden has repeatedly
called his domestic agenda a “blue collar” program. While
declaring ad nauseam that “I am a capitalist,” who has nothing
against people becoming billionaires, he has called on Wall
Street to “pay their fair share.”
How Wealth Inequality Spiraled Out of Control | Robert Reich https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOI8RuhW7q0
IRS data shows: US billionaires' true tax rate far lower than that of workers
Jacob Crosse
On June 8, ProPublica published the first in a projected series of articles documenting the massive scale of legally sanctioned tax evasion carried out by America’s ever-expanding class of billionaires. The article, based on an exhaustive study of leaked Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents, focuses on the period from 2014 through 2018. It demonstrates that in the course of those five years, the 25 richest Americans paid federal taxes on their increased wealth at a far lower rate than the typical US household.
The report also cites tax data on billionaire oligarchs such as Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk and Michael Bloomberg going back to the first decade of the current century, showing that they paid little or no taxes regardless of which big business party—Democrats or Republicans—occupied the White House. It explains as well that even were the Biden administration to carry out its promised increases in income tax rates for the rich, the impact on the vast fortunes of today’s robber barons would be minimal.
The authors state that in determining the increased wealth of America’s “top 0.001 percent,” they included not simply their salaries, which in many cases comprise only a small share of their actual income, but also “investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits.”
Billionaires Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Elon Musk (All originals from Wikimedia Commons)
The result, they note, demolishes “the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most.” They continue: “The IRS records show that the wealthiest can—perfectly legally—pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.”
ProPublica’s revelations provide insight into how the capitalist system and its various state institutions and rigged legal system promote a parasitic financial aristocracy that lives in a world apart from the rest of humanity. Unlike workers, who depend on their wages to survive and pay the full income tax rate, the ultra-wealthy avoid taxes by obtaining massive loans from banks, borrowing against the value of their ever growing and artificially inflated assets, such as stocks and real estate, which are not taxable until they are sold.
In order to calculate what ProPublica terms the “true tax rate” of the 25 richest Americans, the report compares how much in taxes these individuals paid over a given period to how much their wealth grew, using wealth estimates published by Forbes magazine.
Between 2014 and 2018, Forbes estimated that these 25 people saw their wealth increase collectively by $401 billion. The documents obtained by ProPublica show that these same individuals collectively paid $13.6 billion in federal income taxes over the same time period, for a true tax rate of only 3.4 percent. By contrast, ProPublica found that between 2014 and 2018, a typical US worker in his or her 40s experienced a net wealth expansion of about $65,000. That same worker’s tax bills “were almost as much, nearly $62,000, over that five-year period.”
Over that same period, according to ProPublica, Warren Buffett’s wealth increased by $24.3 billion, but the Berkshire Hathaway mogul paid only $23.7 million in taxes, resulting in a true tax rate of 0.10 percent.
Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’ wealth soared by a staggering $99 billion, but he paid just $973 million in taxes, yielding a true tax rate of less than 1 percent.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is another “pandemic profiteer.” He saw his wealth skyrocket this past year, in part by violating a state-ordered shutdown and illegally restarting production at the Fremont, California , Tesla factory, leading to hundreds of coronavirus infections. Between 2014 and 2018 his wealth grew by $13.9 billion, while he paid $455 million in taxes, resulting in a true tax rate of 3.27 percent.
The reporting confirms the Marxist analysis of the capitalist state, described in the Communist Manifesto as “… a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” The various loopholes and tax avoidance schemes employed by the ruling class are legal, have been for decades, and will continue to be so under Biden or any other Democratic administration.
As then-candidate Joe Biden assured wealthy donors at a Manhattan campaign fundraising event in January 2019, should he become president, “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.” Nearly six months into his presidency, Biden has kept his promises to his wealthy benefactors, as evinced by his recent retreat from his proposal to raise corporate taxes by a few percentage points.
Among other facts included in the ProPublica report:
· Bezos, the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes in 2007 and 2011. In 2011, despite his overall wealth holding steady at $18 billion, Bezos filed a tax return in which he claimed to have lost money. The IRS not only approved the billionaire’s tax return, it granted him a $4,000 tax credit for his children!
· Musk, now the second richest person in the world, did not pay any federal income taxes in 2018.
· Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as billionaire investors Carl Icahn and George Soros, have also had years when they paid nothing in federal income taxes. Soros, worth an estimated $8.6 billion as of March 2021, paid no federal income taxes for three years in a row.
According to the ProPublica report, when the super-rich do pay something in income taxes, their true tax rate is far lower than that of the typical working class household, with a median income of $70,000. For instance, between 2006 and 2018, while Bezos’ wealth surged by over $120 billion, he paid, on average, $1.09 in taxes for every $100 in wealth growth. But over the same period, the median American household paid $160 in taxes for every $100 in wealth growth—paying more in taxes than it gained in wealth.
Overall, ProPublica found that the richest 25 Americans pay a far lower income tax rate, an average of 15.8 percent of adjusted gross income, than do many workers, once taxes for Social Security and Medicare are included. To highlight the point, ProPublica found that by the end of 2018, the 25 richest Americans were worth $1.1 trillion and collectively paid a federal tax bill of $1.9 billion.
The $1.1 trillion in collective wealth hoarded by 25 people equals the combined annual wages of roughly 14.3 million American workers, who in 2018 paid $143 billion in federal taxes, or over 75 times more than the billionaires.
On Tuesday, in response to a reporter’s question about the ProPublica report, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki had nothing to say about its damning content. Instead, she threatened criminal prosecution of those who leaked the IRS documents to ProPublica.
“Any unauthorized disclosure of confidential government information by a person of access is illegal and we take this very seriously,” said Psaki. She added that the IRS commissioner has referred the matter to investigators and that the FBI and Justice Department would also be investigating.
DEMOCRAT PARTY - NEVER ENDING ASSAULT ON MIDDLE AMERICA AND THE AMERICAN WORKER!
Bernie Sanders Silent as Corporations Look to Explicitly Grow Profit Margins via Limitless Immigration MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images 3:15
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a self-described Socialist, has remained silent as corporate special interests seek to dramatically shift the nation’s legal immigration system for their benefit.
Last month, House Democrats passed President Joe Biden’s filibuster-proof “Build Back Better Act” reconciliation package, which would blow the lid off legal immigration levels — explicitly to provide an unlimited pipeline of foreign workers to multinational corporations.
Specifically, the reconciliation package would allow corporations to utilize an expanded foreign worker pipeline through the employment-based green card system even as hundreds of thousands of American professionals and graduates seek jobs in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) jobs.
In late October, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) urged Sanders , who is chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, to oppose the reconciliation package for its “corporate carve-out for unlimited foreign labor” that includes “several breathtaking immigration provisions that have long been the crown jewel of corporate lobbying.”
Sanders has been silent, Hagerty told Breitbart News in an exclusive statement.
“It’s been over five weeks since I wrote to Senator Sanders about the corporate carve-out in the so-called ‘Build Back Better’ legislation that benefits Big Tech and harms American workers, and we still haven’t heard a single word of defense from him,” Hagerty said.
“If Senator Sanders is serious about supporting American workers like he proclaims, he should soundly reject this dangerous, hidden provision that would create an unending pipeline of foreign labor for Silicon Valley giants to lower wages and displace aspiring Americans,” he continued.
Sanders did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.
Breitbart News has reviewed lobbying records that detail the lobbying campaign from corporate giants like Amazon, Facebook, Intuit Inc, AT&T, Verizon, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Alphabet, Deloitte, the Microsoft Corporation, IBM, Accenture, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and the Intel Corporation — all of whom would benefit significantly from the expanded foreign worker pipeline.
The corporations, as listed , file thousands of petitions to the federal government every year to secure employment-based green cards for their foreign visa workers who, more often than not, arrive in the U.S. through the H-1B visa program that has been used to replace American workers with cheaper foreign workers.
Amazon, this year alone, petitioned for nearly 3,000 employment-based green cards for their foreign visa workers and foreign nationals seeking to take high-paying white collar jobs. Microsoft and Google, likewise, petitioned for more than 3,300 employment-based green cards.
More than one million white-collar American jobs today are held by foreign visa workers.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here .
Democrats, Big Tech Billionaires Unite to Keep DACA Illegal Aliens in U.S. Jobs Frazer Harrison/JIM WATSON/JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images 4:07
Democrats and billionaire executives for giant tech corporations are urging the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to keep illegal aliens, enrolled in former President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, in American jobs.
In July, Judge Andrew Hanen ordered President Joe Biden’s administration to shut down the DACA program by blocking the federal government from allowing new applicants, illegal aliens who have not previously been enrolled, onto the program’s rolls.
Months later, in September, Biden’s DHS issued a draft regulation that would effectively preserve the DACA program that has allowed more than 800,000 illegal aliens to remain in the United States and hold American jobs since 2012.
In a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Senate Democrats including Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Alex Padilla (D-CA), and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), along with a number of House Democrats, urged the Biden administration to move forward with the regulation and expand the program to include more illegal aliens.
The Democrats write :
To preserve family unity, we urge you to update the DACA threshold criteria to include individuals who had lawful status on June 15, 2012. One of the threshold criteria in the proposed rule is that DACA applicants must have “had no lawful immigration status on June 15, 2012, as well as at the time of filing of the request for DACA.” We ask that DHS to update these criteria to allow individuals who had lawful status in the United States on June 15, 2012, but subsequently lost such status by the time of their request, to qualify for DACA . This update could be accomplished by changing the above criterium to read: “had no lawful status at the time of filing of the request for DACA.” [Emphasis added]
…
We also encourage you to consider adopting additional changes to DACA eligibility requirements that would enable more Documented Dreamers to utilize the protection this program offers if the unlawful status requirement were revoked. Specifically, we urge you to consider removing the threshold criteria that require requestors to have continuously resided in the United States from June 15, 2007 to the time of filing of the request. We also support adjusting the dates in the threshold criteria to provide relief for individuals who arrived in the United States after 2007. These adjustments would help a greater number of Documented Dreamers access relief and avoid accruing unlawful status. [Emphasis added]
Likewise, executives at Amazon, Google, Cisco, the Intel Corporation, IBM, and Meta Platforms have sent a letter to DHS asking that DACA work permits be preserved and that Congress grant amnesty to DACA illegal aliens.
“DACA recipients help us innovate on behalf of customers and are a critical part of our diverse workforce,” the executives wrote. “… DACA recipients enrich our companies and the economy in different ways.”
Already, current immigration levels put downward pressure on U.S. wages while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth away from America’s working and middle class and towards employers and new arrivals, research by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has found.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has repeatedly found that amnesty for illegal aliens would be a net fiscal drain for American taxpayers while driving down U.S. wages.
Every year, 1.2 million legal immigrants receive green cards to permanently resettle in the U.S. In addition, 1.4 million foreign nationals are given visas to take American jobs, while hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens enter the U.S. annually.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here .
In the United States, migration curbs Americans’ productivity , shrinks their political clout , and widens regional wealth gaps . It radicalizes their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture , and allows elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society .
Democrats Prod Parliamentarian to OK Amnesty in Budget Bill Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images 4:16
Top Democratic staffers met Wednesday with the Senate’s debate referee to demand that she include their parole amnesty for illegal migrants in President Joe Biden’s spending bill.
Bloomberg reported that the parliamentarian did not reveal her views:
House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), who helped craft the immigration language in the House, said he’s optimistic.
“This is the third try,” he said earlier Wednesday. “There is no reason that they shouldn’t just accept it.”
In a prior meeting, the parliamentarian “kept it very close to the vest and didn’t react when we made our initial presentation,” Sen. Dick Durbin told reporters on November 30.
The parliamentarian is Elizabeth MacDonough. She has a lot of clout in the legislative process because Senate rules require the exclusion of policy disputes from the fast-track reconciliation bill process. Democrats are using that process because it allows them to push their government-expanding $1.7 trillion bill through the Senate with just 51 votes.
Democrats are also not trying to bypass the parliamentarian because she is backed by several Democrats who represent small states. The Senate’s current debating rules boost the clout of small-state Senators.
Few Republicans are denouncing the Democrats’ donor-backed, wealth-shifting immigration measures, Instead, most are hoping the parliamentarian will exclude the migration measures from the spending bill, so saving them from the pain of arguing against their donors or of ignoring the pro-American demands of their voters.
Still, GOP leaders have appointed an immigration expert to help persuade the parliamentarian to exclude at least some of the migration measures from the bill.
The parole amnesty would provide work permits to 6.5 million illegals for at least 10 years. It is the attention-hogging showpiece immigration measure in the reconciliation bill.
But the bill would also dramatically accelerate chain migration — so spiking housing costs and diverting Americans’ K-12 schools from the basic task of educating Americans’ children.
The legislation would also give Fortune 500 companies a massive new inflow of cheap visa workers to help them exclude U.S. college graduates from rising careers. The green-card giveaway is being criticized this way by some GOP Senators, including Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) .
Bloomberg reported:
Separate immigration provisions that aim to speed up the legal immigration process and address backlogs haven’t yet been presented to the parliamentarian. [Migration advocate Kerri] Talbot said she expects that to happen soon.
Talbot is the deputy director of Immigration Hub, a group created by billionaire widow Laurene Powell Jobs to promote amnesty and migration.
Meanwhile, swing-vote Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is still playing hard to get.
On November 29, for example, he told reporters that he had not studied the House bill’s language on immigration, such as the parole amnesty, the chain-migration acceleration, and the green-card giveaways. Bloomberg.com reported November 29:
Manchin again raised concerns about the impact of more federal spending on inflation, telling reporters that he heard deep concerns about rising prices from his constituents during a week-long Thanksgiving break. The discovery of a new variant of the Covid-19 virus adds to economic uncertainty, he said.
“The unknown is great right now and it gets greater,” Manchin said. “Inflation is now more than transitory. We found out it’s not transitory. And on top of that, you have this new strain of Covid they’re very much concerned about. No one knows what effect it’s going to have. And you have inflation on top. So all these things give you cause to pause.”
In the United States, migration curbs Americans’ productivity , shrinks their political clout , and widens regional wealth gaps . It radicalizes their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture , and allows elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society .
Biden didn’t withdraw from Afghanistan. He brought Afghanistan to America.
Currently, there is an estimated record high of 44.5 million foreign-born residents living in the U.S. This is nearly quadruple the immigrant population in 2000. The vast majority of those arriving in the country every year — more than 1.5 million annually — are low-skilled foreign nationals who go on to compete for jobs against working class Americans.
Bombshell report shows Biden admin secretly transporting migrants around US
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uIaYGTFZK4
JOE BIDEN: EASY WELARE KEEPS OUR ILLEGALS COMING AND VOTING DEMOCRAT FOR MORE!
Likewise, while 31 percent of foreign-born residents are on food stamps, only 19 percent of native-born Americans use the program.
Federal data shows that current legal immigration levels will drive the nation’s foreign-born population to an unprecedented 69 million by 2060. The data indicates that about 1-in-6 U.S. residents in less than four decades will have been born outside the U.S. if legal immigration levels are not reduced. JOHN BINDER
American graduates’ odds of landing STEM jobs are dismal, mostly due to corporate offshoring and the nation’s allowing companies to import foreign visa workers to do the same work for less. Recent Census Bureau data, for example, found that although 37 percent of the college-educated U.S. workforce held STEM degrees, just 14 percent worked in STEM jobs.
Federal data shows that current legal immigration levels will drive the nation’s foreign-born population to an unprecedented 69 million by 2060. The data indicates that about 1-in-6 U.S. residents in less than four decades will have been born outside the U.S. if legal immigration levels are not reduced.
The nation’s foreign-born population stands at 44.5 million — a 108-year record high.
Study: Over Half of Migrants Are on American Taxpayer-Funded Welfare JOHN BINDER
More than half of the nation’s non-citizen population — including legal immigrants, foreign visa workers, and illegal aliens — use American taxpayer-funded welfare after arriving in the United States, a new analysis reveals.
Research by Center for Immigration Studies Director of Research Steven Camarota finds that about 55 percent of non-citizen households in the U.S. use at least one form of welfare compared to just 32 percent of households headed by native-born Americans.
Camarota’s research analyzes the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation data from 2018, showing that 49 percent of households headed by foreign-born residents, including naturalized American citizens, use at least one welfare program.
In 2017, economist George Borjas called the U.S. immigration system “the largest anti-poverty program in the world” at the expense of America’s working and middle class.
Specifically, foreign-born residents used vastly more Medicaid compared to native-born Americans and food stamps. For example, while 33 percent of foreign-born residents use Medicaid, just 20 percent of native-born Americans do so.
Likewise, while 31 percent of foreign-born residents are on food stamps, only 19 percent of native-born Americans use the program.
Camarota’s research reveals that even after years and years of residing in the U.S., foreign-born resident households continue to use high levels of welfare.
About 44 percent of foreign-born residents who resided in the U.S. for 10 years or less use at least one form of welfare. Roughly 50 percent of those who resided in the U.S. for more than 10 years are on welfare.
When naturalized Americans are excluded from that count, the level of welfare use rises significantly for those who have resided in the U.S. for a while. For example, among non-citizen households who resided in the U.S. for 10 years or less, 40 percent use welfare. For those in the U.S. for more than 10 years, about 62 percent are on welfare.
The latest data comes after similar numbers were released in March 2019 that showed that, in 2014, non-citizen households used nearly twice as much welfare as native-born Americans.
Currently, there is an estimated record high of 44.5 million foreign-born residents living in the U.S. This is nearly quadruple the immigrant population in 2000. The vast majority of those arriving in the country every year — more than 1.5 million annually — are low-skilled foreign nationals who go on to compete for jobs against working class Americans.
At current legal immigration levels, the Census Bureau projects that about 1-in-6 U.S. residents will be foreign-born by 2060 with the foreign-born population hitting a record 69 million.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here .
D.C. Lobbies: Cut Inflation by Importing Cheaper Workers MANJUNATH KIRAN/AFP/Getty 5:47
Congress can and should import more wage-cutting migrants to reduce President Joe Biden’s rising inflation, say progressives and business advocates.
“One of the driving forces behind inflation is the shortage of workers … And yet immigration has fallen sharply in recent years amid the pandemic and tougher immigration policies during the Trump administration,” said a CNN report . “Comprehensive immigration reform, which Biden could forcefully advocate for, would help ease the shortage of workers and thus the inflationary pressures, economists say.” Inflation is being fueled by labor shortages, wrote Katherine Rampell, a Washington Post columnist. “There’s one underappreciated factor contributing to labor shortfalls that the Biden administration could alleviate almost immediately: the “missing” immigrant workers.”
The economic logic is correct; More immigration will flood the labor market, so shrinking wages, so reducing the cost of many items, including food and services.
But the vast majority of the benefits would go to wealthy investors and employers — not to the ordinary Americans who might be able to get slightly cheaper groceries as they watch their wages shrink in value.
“The larger crisis in the U.S. labor market is [not a lack of immigrants, but]… the dramatic decline in work among working-age people for the last 50 years,” said Steve Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “If you look at prime-age men, from the time I was born in 1964 to the present, you have basically an uninterrupted 60-year decline” in the share of men who are working, he said.
That share began rising amid President Donald Trump’s low-immigration policies — but then crashed when the coronavirus hit the economy, he said.
Yet many D. C. lobbies and advocates want to shield wealthy investors from inflation by sacrificing the wages of ordinary Americans.
“In the past week, we learned that these [employee shortages] shortages led to the largest year-on-year increase in inflation in over 30 years,” claimed two advocates at the Brookings Institution. “Some of these front-line jobs could be filled from the vast pool of [migrants] … This would help relieve the supply chain pressures currently hampering growth, calm inflation.”
“Welcoming more low-wage foreign workers could address acute labor shortages in certain industries, helping hard-hit areas of the country recover while staving off higher inflation,” Vox.com claimed October 26.
More immigration will flood the labor market, so shrinking wages, so reducing the cost of many items, including food and services. (Image via AFP)
“As for how he would curb inflation, [economist and former Obama advisor, Austan] Goolsbee proposed … boosting immigration to alleviate labor market pressures,” NBC reported Nov. 28.
Some advocates are calling for more migration while also claiming the extra labor supply will not cut wages. “Allowing more working-age immigrants to enter the U.S. can reduce prices without depressing economy-wide wages,” said Eric Levitz, a pro-migration writer at New York Magazine .
But business — including Wall Street — believes that migrants cut wages, and even Biden’s White House officials admit the trade-off.
So Democratic legislators are more careful as they pitch the same migration-cures-inflation pitch.
“If my Republican colleagues think that there is a labor shortage … then they should welcome the ability for migrants, immigrants who have been living in our communities for decades, they should welcome them having access to work permits,” Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Tx) told PBS NewsHour on November 2017.
“If they’re concerned about inflation, as we all are, then we want to get productivity back up.”
On November 14, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen seemingly rejected the cut-wages-to-reduce inflation that was proposed to her by CBS’ interviewer on “Face The Nation”:
There are a lot of issues involved in immigration, but that — I believe that is one reason that we do face supply shortages — shortages of certain kinds of workers … I mean, we’ve long had a problem of more jobs available for skilled workers and declining opportunities for less skilled workers. So focusing on education and training [for Americans] was important and continues to be.
“Labor supply has been impacted by the pandemic — [American] labor force participation is down; it hasn’t recovered,” she noted.
Nonetheless, Biden and his deputies are arguing that his $1.7 trillion Build Back Better bill will reduce inflation by eventually increasing the productivity of U.S. workers.
But that bill would allow government and business executives to also import millions of new workers and consumers who will reduce productivity and drive down wages while also spiking inflation in housing prices .
A columnist at Bloomberg.com noted November 21 that the big-spending bill is not intended to curb inflation:
The truth is that the Democrats aren’t pursuing this spending bill in the spirit of meeting a pressing national objective. They’re just trying to cram as much of the progressive agenda as they can get through Congress before Republicans can end their control of it in the next election. That’s not the kind of advertising pitch likely to work on the public, though. And so we have ended up with the president pretending that this bill is his big idea to whip inflation.
In the United States, migration curbs Americans’ productivity , shrinks their political clout , and widens regional wealth gaps . It radicalizes their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture , and allows elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society .
As the death toll from the pandemic continued to mount, US corporations enjoyed the widest profit margins in more than 70 years during the second and third quarters of 2021.
US corporate profits before adjustments rose to a record high of $3.14 trillion at a seasonally adjusted annual rate in the third quarter of 2021. After tax and adjustments for inventory, profits rose to a record high $2.74 trillion, according to the most recent figures reported by the US Commerce Department.
A sign for a Wall Street building, Wednesday, May 19, 2021, in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan) These numbers, released as the official pandemic death toll in the US nears 800,000, are the direct product of the government’s prioritization of profits over human lives. This was underscored again Monday when President Biden declared there would be no public health measures taken besides vaccines in the face of the spread of the Omicron variant, despite warnings by scientists it may be resistant to vaccines.
Fueled in large part by the government’s mass injections of cash into the economy, profits of domestic nonfinancial corporations increased $67.5 billion in the third quarter and a massive $221.3 billion in the second quarter of 2021. Compared to the final quarter of 2019, the last reporting period prior to the onset of the global pandemic, profits are up an astonishing 39.6 percent. In dollar terms, the annual increase in profits since before the start of the pandemic has been over $500 billion, based on US Commerce Department figures.
Profit margins, that is the share going to profits out of each sales dollar, are at their highest level since 1950, during the early part of the post-World War II economic boom. Nearly two thirds of publicly traded US corporations have reported higher profit margins this year compared to 2020. One hundred of the largest have booked profit margins at least 50 percent above last year’s levels.
The spread of COVID-19 has been used by the ruling class to effect a further vast transfer of wealth from the working class into the coffers of the corporations and very wealthy. Pandemic financial assistance went disproportionately to the rich while the US Federal Reserve has been pouring trillions into the financial markets while keeping interest rates at near zero.
Amid soaring profits, according to figures released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics earlier this month, real average hourly earnings for all employees decreased 0.5 percent from September to October 2021. With inflation rising at the fastest pace since 1990, year-over-year real wages fell 1.2 percent, seasonally adjusted, from October 2020 to October 2021. When combined with a 0.3 percent decrease in the average workweek, there was a 1.6 percent fall in real weekly earnings.
While inflation has had the impact of lowering real wages for workers, corporations, for the most part, have been able to pass higher prices onto consumers. Major retailers such as Walmart, Home Depot and Target saw higher third quarter profits, despite supply chain issues and labor shortages. Walmart’s stock is up 25 percent for the year and Target’s is up 47 percent.
Procter and Gamble, a supplier of home and personal care products, reported a massive 24.7 percent profit margin for the third quarter, with $14.3 billion in net earnings for fiscal 2021. In April, the company announced major price increases for its line of products. Rather than give a price break to consumers, P&G decided to reward investors instead by buying back some $3 billion of its own stock.
Among the big winners were oil companies, whose profits rebounded from last year’s slump amidst rising petroleum prices. ExxonMobil had net income of $6.8 billion in the third quarter of 2021 while Chevron, the second largest US oil company, reported an adjusted profit of $5.7 billion, its best result in eight years and 17 times greater than its earnings one year ago.
The glaring contradiction between soaring profits and the precarious circumstances in which millions are living, facing the danger of infection while soaring inflation erodes incomes, is fueling a wave of working class militancy. On the side of the ruling class, the increase in strikes is raising fears that workers are breaking free from the grip of the corporatist trade unions after decades in which the class struggle has been suppressed. There is the concern that workers will seek significant wage increases, undermining the financial house of cards that has been created by the continual pumping of cheap money into financial markets.
This has already been the case at many companies, including US farm and heavy equipment company John Deere, hit by a bitter five-week strike by members of the United Auto Workers. However, rather than demanding Deere divert money from profits to restore previous concessions forced on workers, the UAW imposed a rotten contract falling far short of workers’ demands and shutting down the strike by 10,000 Deere workers. The UAW used threats and lies to get the contract ratified, falsely claiming the company did not have money to provide adequate wages increases, including the restoration of decades of concessions.
This was despite the fact that the company reported net income of $6 billion for the fiscal year ending October 31, more than double the previous year’s total of $2.8 billion. The company’s previous record was $3.5 billion in 2013. Deere is predicting net income of $6.5 to $7 billion for the current fiscal year.
Cereal maker Kellogg is threatening to hire permanent scab replacements for 1,400 striking workers at five plants across the US. The company reported operating profits of $447 million in the third quarter of 2021, up 9.1 percent from the same period last year. However, management has refused to meet workers’ demands for the elimination of the hated multi-tier wage structure that leaves 30 percent of the workforce at a “transitional level” with lower pay and benefits, as well as grueling 7-day and up to 16-hour work schedules.
The bumper profits for US corporations amid the worst health catastrophe in 100 years is due to the policies of a criminal ruling class that at every point has prioritized profits over human lives. There is no level of death that will make the government change course, because policy is entirely subordinated to the profit interests of the wealthy.
This has been the case since the start of the pandemic, when the ruling class decided to conceal the dangers posed to the population by the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in order to shore up financial markets and forestall a stock market collapse.
The working class must intervene to demand that the vast resources now flowing to the coffers of big business be used instead to fight the global pandemic. The powerful scientific resources of society must be used to eliminate and eradicate the virus, saving the lives of millions.
Make Amazon Pay was formed in 2020 and has since helped to organize a number of strikes and protests against company policies. The campaign states on its website: “During the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon became a trillion dollar corporation, with Bezos becoming the first person in history to amass $200 billion in personal wealth. Meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers risked their lives as essential workers, and only briefly received an increase in pay.”
A video on the Make Amazon Pay website further states: “Amazon’s wealth has increased so much during the pandemic that its owners could pay all 1.3 million of its employees a $690,000 COVID bonus and still be as rich as they were in 2020.”
Read more at Business Insider here.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has approved a new union election at one of Amazon’s Alabama warehouses this week. The warehouse workers voted against unionization in April, but following complaints to the federal agency, a revote has been ordered.
CNBC reports that the NLRB has authorized a new union election at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, known as BHM1. In April, workers at the warehouse voted against joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU).
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (Isaac Brekken/AP)
Jeff Bezos holds goggles to his face (Joe Raedle /Getty)
The union has since argued that Amazon illegally interfered in the election, resulting in a legal battle in which the NLRB ruled in the union’s favor. NLRB spokesperson Kayla Blado confirmed to CNBC that the agency has ordered a new election.
At the initial unionization vote of BHM1 in April, employees rejected forming a union with less than 30 percent of votes favoring joining the RWDSU. The RWDSU challenged the results, claiming that Amazon illegally interfered in the election and began a protracted legal battle with months of hearings examining the company’s actions in the time leading up to the vote.
People hold placards during a protest in support of Amazon workers in Union Square, New York on February 20, 2021. (Photo by KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images)
A major issue that RWDSU had was that Amazon installed a mailbox on-site at the facility which the union argued created a false appearance that Amazon was conducting the election and intimidated workers into voting against the union.
In August, an NLRB hearing officer suggested that the results be set aside and another vote should take place, Amazon said it would appeal the decision at the time. Region 10 Director Lisa Henderson issue the decision and directions for a second election at BHM1 this week.
Henderson wrote in her decision: “I agree with the hearing officer’s recommendations. Accordingly, I affirm the hearing officer’s rulings, I adopt her recommendation to sustain certain objections, and I order a second election.”
An Amazon spokesperson told CNCB that the company disagrees with the NLRB’s decision and that Amazon doesn’t think unions are the answer for its employees.
“Our employees have always had the choice of whether or not to join a union, and they overwhelmingly chose not to join the RWDSU earlier this year,” the Amazon spokesperson said. “It’s disappointing that the NLRB has now decided that those votes shouldn’t count.”
Union President Stuart Appelbaum said in a statement: “Today’s decision confirms what we were saying all along – that Amazon’s intimidation and interference prevented workers from having a fair say in whether they wanted a union in their workplace – and as the Regional Director has indicated, that is both unacceptable and illegal. Amazon workers deserve to have a voice at work, which can only come from a union.”
Read more at CNBC here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
DO A SEARCH FOR OBAMA AND HIS SAUDIS PARTNERS. BARACK LOVES THE SMELL OF DIRTY MONEY. HE WAS WITNESS TO THE SAUDIS BUILDING THE BUSH-SAUDIS PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AFTER BUSH PROTECTED THE SAUDIS AFTER THEY INVADED US 9/11. THEN THE SAUDIS PUMPED BIG MONEY INTO THE CLINTON LIBRARY AND THE CLINTON FOUNDATION FAMILY SLUSH FUND.... WITH THESE PIG LAWYERS, JUST FOLLOW THE MONEY!
CODA
OBOMB'S SO CALLED PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY WILL NOT HOUSE HIS PRESIDENTIAL PAPERS. WE HAVE WATCHED FROM THE BEGINNING OBAMA COVER HIS TRAIL AND CONCEAL HIS TRUE IDENTITY: THE MAN WHO WOULD BE DICTATOR.
Bezos ‘Greases’ Way Into Dem Establishment With $100 Million Obama Donation Obama-Biden alum Jay Carney arranged the massive gift
Jeff Bezos and Jill Biden, in 2016 (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Santi Ruiz • November 22, 2021 5:40 pm
Faced with scorn from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos appears ready to "grease" his way into the Democratic establishment with a $100 million donation to the Obama Foundation, according to Puck News .
The donation was arranged by Amazon executive and former Obama press secretary Jay Carney. The no-strings-attached gift comes as Bezos faces growing opposition from the left. The gift is the largest ever made to the foundation, which has chosen to forgo the traditional presidential library in favor of building a privately managed presidential center.
Bezos's donation comes at a difficult political moment for Amazon. Lawmakers from both parties fault the company for its poor treatment of workers and abuse of its market power. The company has also come under fire for banning conservative voices. This year, Amazon banned a book that criticizes transgender ideology and blocked an ad for a book that criticizes the Black Lives Matter movement.
Bezos has tasked Carney, who served as then-vice president Joe Biden's communications director, to ingratiate Amazon with Democratic lawmakers. Under Carney's leadership, Amazon's lobbying team has grown from about two dozen to 250 members. Reuters reported Friday that Carney has successfully lobbied to kill privacy protections for consumers in 25 states.
Amazon is not the only Bezos project to pique the ire of leading Democrats. NASA administrator and former Democratic senator Bill Nelson blamed Bezos's Blue Origin for causing a delay in a U.S. return to the moon. The space exploration company sued NASA after it lost a major contract to Elon Musk's SpaceX.
Obama's presidential center is the first presidential library or museum to be run by a partisan nonprofit, rather than by the National Archives and Records Administration. Bezos's ex-wife Mackenzie Scott and Bill and Melinda Gates have already made substantial donations to the center, which presidential scholars worry will become a partisan slush fund.
Activists on Chicago's South Side said the center will force out longtime neighborhood residents. The center received a tax-free, 99-year lease on almost 20 acres of public parkland from the city of Chicago, for $10 in total. The center will be allowed to charge fees and keep the profits.
Bezos has ramped up his philanthropy over the past four years, pledging millions of dollars to liberal causes and figures. Earlier this year, he pledged $1 billion to conservation efforts and gave $100 million to CNN contributor Van Jones.
A video on the Make Amazon Pay website further states: “Amazon’s wealth has increased so much during the pandemic that its owners could pay all 1.3 million of its employees a $690,000 COVID bonus and still be as rich as they were in 2020.”
BIDEN CRONY BEZOS IS THE RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD AND YET PAID NO, OR LITTLE INCOME TAX. THE SYSTEM IS RIGGED TO PROTECT THE DEMOCRAT PARTY'S BASE OF TECH BILLIONAIRES FOR OPEN BORDERS!
JOE BIDEN HAS HANDED OVER TO AMAZON BEZOS BILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF GOV CONTRACTS.
Inside Jeff Bezos' $78 MillIon Dollar Hawaii Estate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kELjWUwqllc
Inside Jeff Bezos Mansions
Jeff Bezos' $400 Million Flying Fox Yacht https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRYEcushHjc
Inside Jeff Bezos' $21,000,000 Car Collection
Inside Jeff Bezos' $300 Million Mansions
CON MAN JOE FROM SCRANTON
During the 2020 Democratic primaries, every candidate pledged
to repeal the Trump tax cut for the rich. Biden has repeatedly
called his domestic agenda a “blue collar” program. While
declaring ad nauseam that “I am a capitalist,” who has nothing
against people becoming billionaires, he has called on Wall
Street to “pay their fair share.”
How Wealth Inequality Spiraled Out of Control | Robert Reich https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOI8RuhW7q0
Climate crazies Extinction Rebellion blockaded a number of Amazon warehouses in the UK on Black Friday, the company’s busiest day of the year.
Thirteen Amazon warehouses in the UK were targetted by Extinction Rebellion, in an attempt to disrupt the retail giant’s busiest day of the year and protest against the supposedly environmentally damaging practices of Amazon.
The group began its blockade of Amazon’s largest warehouse in the UK in Dunfermline, Scotland, at 4 am on Friday, according to a report from The Telegraph.
Protesters prevented lorries from leaving the site, as well as some from entering through the use of placards, and by using so-called “lock-ons” — devices that are designed to prevent protesters from being removed.
Extinction Rebellion claimed that every Amazon distribution centre in the UK would be targeted by the organisation, with similar protests also occurring in the US, Germany, and the Netherlands.
Over 31 XR activists were arrested at Amazon warehouses across the country on Black Friday, the BBC reported .
A spokeswoman for the far-left climate alarmist group at the Dunfermline blockade stated that they were being watched by police, who reportedly had a single van on-site. She also stated that the group had brought “good vibes and music”.
“The action is intended to draw attention to Amazon’s exploitative and environmentally destructive business practices, disregard for workers’ rights in the name of company profits, as well as the wastefulness of Black Friday,” another spokesman for the group stated.
The tactics employed by left-wing climate protesters have come under increased scrutiny after an XR splinter group, Insulate Britain, used similar methods to cause chaos in September and October.
Activists frequently glued themselves to the tarmac in order to maximize disruption during attempts to shut down major roads and motorways, such as the M25.
The protests reportedly resulted in serious injuries by delaying people who required urgent medical attention from reaching medical centres.
Nine of the group’s eco-warriors were subsequently jailed for violating a court injunction that prohibited the blockading of roads.
On social media, Extinction Rebellion claimed that they are “trying to wake people up to reality” with the blockades and that in order for governments to act on climate change, “mass disruption” and “civil resistance” are required.
“There’s no guarantee it will bring the change we need, but after COP26, it should be obvious that nothing else will,” one post stated.
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY AT WORK: Make Amazon Pay was formed in 2020 and has since helped to organize a number of strikes and protests against company policies. The campaign states on its website: “During the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon became a trillion dollar corporation, with Bezos becoming the first person in history to amass $200 billion in personal wealth. Meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers risked their lives as essential workers, and only briefly received an increase in pay.”
During the 2020 Democratic primaries, every candidate pledged to repeal the Trump tax cut for the rich. Biden has repeatedly called his domestic agenda a “blue collar” program. While declaring ad nauseam that “I am a capitalist,” who has nothing against people becoming billionaires, he has called on Wall Street to “pay their fair share.”
Inside Jeff Bezos Mansions
Jeff Bezos' $400 Million Flying Fox Yacht https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRYEcushHjc
Inside Jeff Bezos' $21,000,000 Car Collection
IRS data shows: US billionaires' true tax rate far lower than that of workers
Jacob Crosse
On June 8, ProPublica published the first in a projected series of articles documenting the massive scale of legally sanctioned tax evasion carried out by America’s ever-expanding class of billionaires. The article, based on an exhaustive study of leaked Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents, focuses on the period from 2014 through 2018. It demonstrates that in the course of those five years, the 25 richest Americans paid federal taxes on their increased wealth at a far lower rate than the typical US household.
The report also cites tax data on billionaire oligarchs such as Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Elon Musk and Michael Bloomberg going back to the first decade of the current century, showing that they paid little or no taxes regardless of which big business party—Democrats or Republicans—occupied the White House. It explains as well that even were the Biden administration to carry out its promised increases in income tax rates for the rich, the impact on the vast fortunes of today’s robber barons would be minimal.
The authors state that in determining the increased wealth of America’s “top 0.001 percent,” they included not simply their salaries, which in many cases comprise only a small share of their actual income, but also “investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits.”
Billionaires Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Elon Musk (All originals from Wikimedia Commons)
The result, they note, demolishes “the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most.” They continue: “The IRS records show that the wealthiest can—perfectly legally—pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.”
ProPublica’s revelations provide insight into how the capitalist system and its various state institutions and rigged legal system promote a parasitic financial aristocracy that lives in a world apart from the rest of humanity. Unlike workers, who depend on their wages to survive and pay the full income tax rate, the ultra-wealthy avoid taxes by obtaining massive loans from banks, borrowing against the value of their ever growing and artificially inflated assets, such as stocks and real estate, which are not taxable until they are sold.
In order to calculate what ProPublica terms the “true tax rate” of the 25 richest Americans, the report compares how much in taxes these individuals paid over a given period to how much their wealth grew, using wealth estimates published by Forbes magazine.
Between 2014 and 2018, Forbes estimated that these 25 people saw their wealth increase collectively by $401 billion. The documents obtained by ProPublica show that these same individuals collectively paid $13.6 billion in federal income taxes over the same time period, for a true tax rate of only 3.4 percent. By contrast, ProPublica found that between 2014 and 2018, a typical US worker in his or her 40s experienced a net wealth expansion of about $65,000. That same worker’s tax bills “were almost as much, nearly $62,000, over that five-year period.”
Over that same period, according to ProPublica, Warren Buffett’s wealth increased by $24.3 billion, but the Berkshire Hathaway mogul paid only $23.7 million in taxes, resulting in a true tax rate of 0.10 percent.
Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’ wealth soared by a staggering $99 billion, but he paid just $973 million in taxes, yielding a true tax rate of less than 1 percent.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is another “pandemic profiteer.” He saw his wealth skyrocket this past year, in part by violating a state-ordered shutdown and illegally restarting production at the Fremont, California , Tesla factory, leading to hundreds of coronavirus infections. Between 2014 and 2018 his wealth grew by $13.9 billion, while he paid $455 million in taxes, resulting in a true tax rate of 3.27 percent.
The reporting confirms the Marxist analysis of the capitalist state, described in the Communist Manifesto as “… a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” The various loopholes and tax avoidance schemes employed by the ruling class are legal, have been for decades, and will continue to be so under Biden or any other Democratic administration.
As then-candidate Joe Biden assured wealthy donors at a Manhattan campaign fundraising event in January 2019, should he become president, “no one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.” Nearly six months into his presidency, Biden has kept his promises to his wealthy benefactors, as evinced by his recent retreat from his proposal to raise corporate taxes by a few percentage points.
Among other facts included in the ProPublica report:
· Bezos, the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes in 2007 and 2011. In 2011, despite his overall wealth holding steady at $18 billion, Bezos filed a tax return in which he claimed to have lost money. The IRS not only approved the billionaire’s tax return, it granted him a $4,000 tax credit for his children!
· Musk, now the second richest person in the world, did not pay any federal income taxes in 2018.
· Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as billionaire investors Carl Icahn and George Soros, have also had years when they paid nothing in federal income taxes. Soros, worth an estimated $8.6 billion as of March 2021, paid no federal income taxes for three years in a row.
According to the ProPublica report, when the super-rich do pay something in income taxes, their true tax rate is far lower than that of the typical working class household, with a median income of $70,000. For instance, between 2006 and 2018, while Bezos’ wealth surged by over $120 billion, he paid, on average, $1.09 in taxes for every $100 in wealth growth. But over the same period, the median American household paid $160 in taxes for every $100 in wealth growth—paying more in taxes than it gained in wealth.
Overall, ProPublica found that the richest 25 Americans pay a far lower income tax rate, an average of 15.8 percent of adjusted gross income, than do many workers, once taxes for Social Security and Medicare are included. To highlight the point, ProPublica found that by the end of 2018, the 25 richest Americans were worth $1.1 trillion and collectively paid a federal tax bill of $1.9 billion.
The $1.1 trillion in collective wealth hoarded by 25 people equals the combined annual wages of roughly 14.3 million American workers, who in 2018 paid $143 billion in federal taxes, or over 75 times more than the billionaires.
On Tuesday, in response to a reporter’s question about the ProPublica report, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki had nothing to say about its damning content. Instead, she threatened criminal prosecution of those who leaked the IRS documents to ProPublica.
“Any unauthorized disclosure of confidential government information by a person of access is illegal and we take this very seriously,” said Psaki. She added that the IRS commissioner has referred the matter to investigators and that the FBI and Justice Department would also be investigating.
THERE'S NO ONE UP HIGH TECH'S ASS MORE THAN BIDEN! THERE WILL BE NO HIGH-TECH ANTI-TRUST UNDER THE BIDEN REGIME!
The donation comes after the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust introduced five bills last summer aimed to curb anti-competitive practices in the tech industry. The bills have been presented as a bipartisan effort to rein in the power of dominant Silicon Valley companies.
IT PAYS TO OWN A FEW DEMOCRAT POLS A video on the Make Amazon Pay website further states: “Amazon’s wealth has increased so much during the pandemic that its owners could pay all 1.3 million of its employees a $690,000 COVID bonus and still be as rich as they were in 2020.”
Read more at Business Insider here.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is donating $100 million to the Obama Foundation in the wake of Amazon clashing with the Biden administration over antitrust issues.
Bezos’ $100 million donation to the Obama Foundation, made in honor of late Rep. John Lewis, is the foundation’s largest individual contribution received to date, the Obama Foundation announced in a Monday press release.
Jeff Bezos lectures normal people about climate change Pool/Getty)
GLASGOW, SCOTLAND – NOVEMBER 08: Former US President Barack Obama delivers a speech while attending day nine of the COP26 at SECC on November 8, 2021 in Glasgow, Scotland. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
The donation comes after the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust introduced five bills last summer aimed to curb anti-competitive practices in the tech industry. The bills have been presented as a bipartisan effort to rein in the power of dominant Silicon Valley companies.
One bill aimed to prevent technology companies from favoring their own products and services on their platform, a practice that Google and Amazon have been accused of. Another targeted the use of data obtained from competitors to gain an advantage over them, a practice that has made Amazon the subject of an EU antitrust investigation.
Moreover, Lina Khan, the Chairperson of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), is reportedly probing Amazon’s $8.5 billion acquisition of MGM Studios. In June, Amazon demanded that Khan recuse herself from any FTC probes of the company, reported New York Post .
Bezos’ nine-figure gift to the Obama Foundation was arranged by former Obama press secretary and current Amazon senior vice president of global corporate affairs Jay Carney, according to a report by Puck News.
The Obama Foundation says Bezos’ donation will “help expand the scope of programming that reaches emerging leaders in the United States and around the world,” adding that Bezos “has asked for the Plaza at the Obama Presidential Center to be named the John Lewis Plaza.”
While the foundation was vague regarding what Bezos’ donation will be spent on, it said that the money will give “the next generation of emerging leaders” the “necessary tools, resources, and training needed to be the change they want to see in the world, just as Congressman Lewis did.”
“I’m thrilled to support President and Mrs. Obama and their Foundation in its mission to train and inspire tomorrow’s leaders,” Bezos said.
Earlier this month, former President Barack Obama jetted into Glasgow, Scotland, for the COP26 climate conference to tell “old folks” to “get out of the way.”
“From the perspective of the Obama Foundation, one of the things I’m most excited about is to see the young activists from around the world who are taking up the baton and not just working in their own countries, but now forming a collective movement across borders to tell the older generation that has gotten us into this mess that we all have an obligation to dig our way out of it,” Obama said in a recorded a video message.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo , and on Instagram .
DEMOCRAT = THE MODERN SLAVE LABOR PARTY OF OPEN BORDERS, GLOBALIST AND NAFTA PIGS!
BEZOSHEAD IS RIGHT AT NAFTA BIDEN'S SIDE WITH MARK ZUCKERBERG ON THE OTHER SIDE PUSHING FOR AMNESTY, WIDER OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED AND NO LEGAL NEED APPLY!
‘Make Amazon Pay:’ Workers in 20 Countries Plan to Strike on Black Friday KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images 3:29
Amazon employees in 20 countries are reportedly preparing to strike on Black Friday as part of a campaign titled “Make Amazon Pay.”
Business Insider reports that Amazon employees in 20 different countries are planning a mass strike on Black Friday, one of the busiest shopping days of the year, as part of the “Make Amazon Pay” campaign. The campaign includes a coalition of 70 organizations including Greenpeace, Oxfam, and Amazon Workers International.
Mural of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. (Thierry Ehrmann/Flickr)
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (Isaac Brekken/AP)
The workers are demanding accountability from top executives who they believe are placing profits ahead of worker wellbeing. Individual workers “from oil refineries, to factories, to warehouses, to data centers, to corporate offices” are expected to take part in the walkout on November 26.
Make Amazon Pay wrote in a list of demands on its website: “The pandemic has exposed how Amazon places profits ahead of workers, society, and our planet. Amazon takes too much and gives back too little. It is time to Make Amazon Pay.”
The protests come as Amazon employees continue to complain of long hours, low pay, and strict performance review systems. Make Amazon Pay is demanding increased salaries, improved job security, and the suspension of the “harsh productivity and surveillance regime Amazon has used to squeeze workers.”
The group is also calling for a “pay back to society” which will include enhanced environmental sustainability efforts, increased transparency over the use of user data and privacy measures, and the immediate end of partnerships between Amazon and police forces and immigration authorities which are “institutionally racist.”
“Amazon is not alone in these bad practices but it sits at the heart of a failed system that drives the inequality, climate breakdown, and democratic decay that scar our age,” Make Amazon Pay wrote in its demands.
A company spokesperson told Business Insider that the company is “inventing and investing significantly” in several of the categories that the campaign is calling for action in, including climate efforts. The spokesperson said:
These groups represent a variety of interests, and while we are not perfect in any area, if you objectively look at what Amazon is doing in each one of these areas you’ll see that we do take our role and our impact very seriously.
Make Amazon Pay was formed in 2020 and has since helped to organize a number of strikes and protests against company policies. The campaign states on its website: “During the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon became a trillion dollar corporation, with Bezos becoming the first person in history to amass $200 billion in personal wealth. Meanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers risked their lives as essential workers, and only briefly received an increase in pay.”
A video on the Make Amazon Pay website further states: “Amazon’s wealth has increased so much during the pandemic that its owners could pay all 1.3 million of its employees a $690,000 COVID bonus and still be as rich as they were in 2020.”
Read more at Business Insider here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com
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