THE
RICH LOVE THE SWAMP KEEPER. HE CUT THEIR TAXES AND CUT FOOD STAMP FOR THE POOR
TO COVER THE DIFFERENCE.
!ALL!
BILLIONAIRES WANT AMNESTY, WIDER OPEN BORDERS AND DENOUNCE E-VERIFY. KEEP WAGES
DEPRESSED TO NEAR SLAVE LABOR LEVELS HELPED THEM GET RICH. JUST ASK MODERN
SLAVER JEFF BEZOS OF AMAZON.
World’s 500 Richest People Increased Their Wealth by $1.2 Trillion in 2019
Jeff Bezos is still the richest person on the planet. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
The world’s richest people had a good year in 2019, increasing their wealth by a staggering 25 percent. A new analysis of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index found that the 500 richest people on the planet increased their vast wealth by $1.2 trillion in the past year, bringing their total wealth to $5.9 trillion.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos remains the richest person in the world, even in a year that saw him lose around $8 billion due to his divorce from ex-wife McKenzie. She is now 25th on the Bloomberg index, with $37.5 billion.
Among the top gainers of the year were Mark Zuckerberg, whose wealth jumped by $27.3 billion, and Bill Gates, who is $22.7 billion richer than he was at the start of the year. French magnate Bernard Arnault, the third richest person in the world, saw his wealth increase by $36.5 billion in 2019.
One billionaire not on the list is Michael Bloomberg, who owns the website that published it. According to Forbes, Bloomberg’s net worth is around $53.4 billion, which would rank him 19th on the list. But Bloomberg News does not cover Bloomberg LP, so the boss is not on the list.
Incidentally, Elizabeth Warren, one of the leading proponents of soaking the rich in the Democratic race for the presidency, released a new explainer of her wealth tax this week. What timing.
The wealth
of the top 1% of Americans has grown dramatically in the past four decades, squeezing both
the middle class and the poor. This is in sharp contrast to Europe and Asia,
where the wealth of the 1% has grown at a more constrained pace.
The 2018 reading is the
first to incorporate the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-2017 tax
bill, which was reckoned by many
economists to be skewed in favor of the wealthy.
economists to be skewed in favor of the wealthy.
Report:
Amazon Execs Shot Down Worker Safety Initiative Costing 4 Cents a Package
27 Dec 201921
2:57
A new report from BuzzFeed News and ProPublica investigates the
human costs of Amazon’s extremely fast delivery system. According to the report,
the e-commerce giant has sacrificed worker and contractor safety in the name of
profit and efficiency, including denying one executive’s safety plan including
initiatives like providing more driver breaks, because it would cost Jeff
Bezos’ empire 4 cents a package to implement.
A report from BuzzFeed News and ProPublica investigates how
Amazon’s delivery logistics department has prioritized speed and cost over
employee safety. The report alleges that Amazon officials have repeatedly
ignored or overlooked signs that the firm was overloading its delivery network
while failing to provide employees with the training and oversight that
delivery firms such as UPS give its employees.
BuzzFeed and ProPublica interviewed a number of former and
current Amazon employees including delivery drivers and contractors. These
interviews appear to show how the company repeatedly delayed safety initiatives
out of concern that it could jeopardize its mission of satisfying customers
with fast delivery times.
From the report:
In the early days of Amazon’s expansion into logistics,
executives wrestled over what price to put on safety. One shot down another’s
plan to boost safety by giving drivers longer rest breaks and capping the
number of packages per route. Those measures would have cost 4 cents per
package.
Several years later, an audit team found that some delivery
contractors were exploiting drivers or failing to carry enough insurance.
Amazon chose to lay off the head of the audit team, according to people
familiar with the matter.
Last year, as the number of packages soared, one manager simply
dialed up the speed on the conveyor belts in a delivery station, injuring
workers and prompting an internal investigation, documents show. To get the
ever-increasing volume of packages to customers, Amazon rushed new drivers
through the hiring process, adding one who had night blindness and another who
acknowledged medicinal use of marijuana, company documents and interviews show.
One former employee told reporters that some drivers were being
forced to deliver too any packages at an inhuman pace. “The means to the end is
something they don’t care about,” said a former Amazon manager who quit in
2017. “If we are forcing these drivers to go like bats out of hell to get this
stuff all over town, that’s OK, because we are making it great for our
customers. The human cost of this is too much.”
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
World’s
500 Richest People Increased Their Wealth by $1.2 Trillion in 2019
Jeff Bezos is still the richest person on the planet. Photo: Mark
Wilson/Getty Images
The world’s richest people had a good
year in 2019, increasing their wealth by a staggering 25 percent. A new analysis of the
Bloomberg Billionaires Index found that the 500 richest people on the planet
increased their vast wealth by $1.2 trillion in the past year, bringing their
total wealth to $5.9 trillion.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos remains the
richest person in the world, even in a year that saw him lose around $8
billion due to his divorce from
ex-wife McKenzie.
She is now 25th on the Bloomberg index, with $37.5 billion.
Among the top gainers of the year
were Mark Zuckerberg, whose wealth jumped by $27.3 billion, and Bill Gates, who
is $22.7 billion richer than he was at the start of the year. French magnate
Bernard Arnault, the third richest person in the world, saw his wealth increase
by $36.5 billion in 2019.
One billionaire not on the list is
Michael Bloomberg, who owns the website that published it. According to Forbes, Bloomberg’s net worth is
around $53.4 billion,
which would rank him 19th on the list. But Bloomberg News does not cover Bloomberg
LP, so the boss is
not on the list.
Incidentally, Elizabeth Warren, one
of the leading proponents of soaking the rich in the Democratic race for the
presidency, released a new explainer of her wealth tax this week. What timing.
Richest 400 Americans paid lower taxes than
everyone else in 2018
According to an analysis by noted economists Emmanuel Saez and
Gabriel Zucman, previewed this week by New
York Times columnist David Leonhardt, the wealthiest American
households paid a lower tax rate last year than every other income group for
the first time in the country’s history.
Saez and Zucman, both professors at the University of California
Berkeley, detail the phenomenon of declining taxes for the richest Americans in
their soon-to-be released book, The
Triumph of Injustice .
The pair compiled a historical database composed of the tax
payments of households in various income percentiles spanning all the way back
to 1913, when the federal income tax was first implemented. Their research
uncovered that in the 2018 fiscal year the wealthiest 400 Americans paid a
lower tax rate—accounting for federal, state, and local taxes—than anyone else.
The overall tax rate paid by the richest .01 percent was only 23
percent last year, while the bottom half of the population paid 24.2 percent.
This contrasts starkly with the overall tax rates on the wealthy of 70 percent
in 1950 and 47 percent in 1980.
The taxes on the wealthy have been in precipitous decline since
the latter half of the 20th century as successive presidential administrations
enacted tax cuts for the rich, suggesting that they would result in economic
prosperity for all. Taxes that mostly affect the wealthy, such as the estate
tax and corporate tax, have been drastically cut and lawyers have been hard at
work on the beliefs of their wealthy patrons planning out the best schemes for
tax avoidance, seeking to drive tax rates as close to zero as possible. The
impetus for the historical tipping point was the Trump Administration’s 2017
tax reform, which was a windfall for the super-rich.
Supported by both the Republican and Democratic Parties, the two
parties of Wall Street, Trump’s tax cuts were specifically designed to transfer
massive amounts of wealth from the working class to the ruling elite.
The corporate tax rate was permanently slashed from 35 percent
to 21 percent, potentially increasing corporate revenues by more than $6
trillion in the next decade. The bill also reduced the individual federal
income tax rate for the wealthy and included a number of other provisions to
further ease their tax burden.
The story is different for many middle- and working-class
Americans. According to multiple analyses of the 2017 tax reform, 83 percent of
the tax benefits will go to the top 1 percent by 2027, while 53 percent of the
population, or those making less than $75,000 annually, will pay higher taxes.
At the same time, the reform will sharply increase budget deficits and the
national debt, granting the pretense for the further destruction of domestic
social programs.
Furthermore, a majority of Americans are paying higher payroll
taxes, which cover Medicare and Social Security. The tax increased from 2
percent just after World War II, to 6 percent in 1960, to 15.3 percent in 1990,
where it stands today. It has risen to become the largest tax that 62 percent
of American households pay.
The result of the multitude of changes to the US tax system over
the last three-quarters of a century is one that has become less progressive
over time. The 2017 tax reform effectively set up the foundation for a
regressive tax policy where the wealthy pay lower tax rates than the poor.
The implementation of a regressive tax structure has played a
major role in engineering the redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the
top that has brought social inequality in America to its highest level since
the 1920s.
According to Leonhardt’s preliminary Times review of The Triumph of Injustice,
Saez and Zucman offer a solution to the current unjust tax system in which the
overall tax rate on the top 1 percent of income earners would rise to 60
percent. The pair claim that the tax increase would bring in approximately $750
billion in taxes. Their tax code also includes a wealth tax and a minimum
global corporate tax of 25 percent, requiring corporations to pay taxes on
profits made in the United States, even if their headquarters are overseas.
In an interview with Leonhardt, Zucman states that history shows
that the US has raised tax rates on the wealthy before so therefore it should
be possible to do so now.
However, the last half century of counterrevolution waged
against the working class makes the parasitic nature of the ruling elite
absolutely clear, and underscores the well-known fact that the US is ruled by
an oligarchy that controls the political system. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans, who both represent
this oligarchy and bear responsibility for the tax system, will make any effort
to implement Saez and Zucman’s modest proposal.
California
became a Democratic stronghold not because Californians became
socialists, but because millions of socialists
moved there. Immigration turned California
blue, and immigration is ultimately to blame for California's
high poverty level.
Economists: America’s Elite Pay Lower Tax Rate Than All Other Americans
Getty Images
The wealthiest
Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans, groundbreaking
analysis from a pair of economists reveals.
For the
first time on record, the wealthiest 400 Americans in 2018 paid a lower tax
rate than all of the income groups in the United States, research highlighted by the New York Times from
University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel
Zucman finds.
The
analysis concludes that the country’s top economic elite are paying lower
federal, state, and local tax rates than the nation’s working and middle class.
Overall, these top 400 wealthy Americans paid just a 23 percent tax rate, which
the Times‘ op-ed columnist David Leonhardt notes is a
combined tax payment of “less than one-quarter of their total income.”
This 23
percent tax rate for the rich means their rate has been slashed by 47
percentage points since 1950 when their tax rate was 70 percent.
(Screenshot
via the New York Times)
The
analysis finds that the 23 percent tax rate for the wealthiest Americans is
less than every other income group in the U.S. — including those earning
working and middle-class incomes, as a Times graphic shows.
Leonhardt
writes:
For
middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal
income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t
benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate tax. And
they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social
Security) than in the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat.
[Emphasis added]
The report
comes as Americans increasingly see a growing divide between the rich and
working class, as the Pew Research Center has found.
Sen. Josh
Hawley (R-MO), the leading economic nationalist in the Senate, has warned
against the Left-Right coalition’s consensus on open trade, open markets, and
open borders, a plan that he has called an economy that works solely for the
elite.
“The same
consensus says that we need to pursue and embrace economic globalization and
economic integration at all costs — open markets, open borders, open trade,
open everything no matter whether it’s actually good for American national
security or for American workers or for American families or for American
principles … this is the elite consensus that has governed our politics
for too long and what it has produced is a politics of elite ambition,”
Hawley said in an August speech in the
Senate.
That
increasing worry of rapid income inequality is only further justified by
economic research showing a rise in servant-class jobs,
strong economic recovery for elite zip codes but not for working-class
regions, and skyrocketing wage growth for the billionaire class at 15 times
the rate of other Americans.
Census Says U.S.
Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018
(Bloomberg) -- Income
inequality in America widened “significantly” last year, according to a U.S.
Census Bureau report published Thursday.
A measure of inequality
known as the Gini index rose to 0.485 from 0.482 in 2017, according to the
bureau’s survey of household finances. The measure compares incomes at the top
and bottom of the distribution, and a score of 0 is perfect equality.
The 2018 reading is the
first to incorporate the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-2017 tax
bill, which was reckoned by many
economists to be skewed in favor of the wealthy.
economists to be skewed in favor of the wealthy.
But the distribution of
income and wealth in the U.S. has been worsening for decades, making America
the most unequal country in the developed world. The trend, which has persisted
through recessions and recoveries, and under administrations of both parties,
has put inequality at the center of U.S. politics.
Leading candidates for
the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, including senators Elizabeth
Warren and Bernie Sanders, are promising to rectify the tilt toward the rich
with measures such as taxes on wealth or financial transactions.
Just five states --
California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana and New York, plus the District of
Columbia and Puerto Rico -- had Gini indexes higher than the national level,
while the reading was lower in 36 states.
White House,
congressional Republicans accelerate drive for corporate tax cut worth trillions
The push is accelerating for an overhaul of the US tax system that
will divert trillions of additional dollars to the corporate aristocracy, widen
the gap between the rich and the working class and set the stage for the
destruction of basic social programs.
On Thursday, the Republican-controlled House Ways and Means
Committee passed a White House-backed tax bill on a party-line vote, after
which House leaders said the measure would come to the House floor for a vote
next week. On the same day, the Republican-controlled Senate released its
version of the measure, with plans for a floor vote in the upper chamber before
the Thanksgiving holiday later this month.
If passed, the two versions will be reconciled and a final bill
will be moved through the two chambers and signed into law by President Trump.
The Trump administration and congressional Republicans are pushing
for passage of the handout to the richest 5 percent by Christmas. The Democrats
are putting on a show of opposition that is cynical to the core. They are
denouncing the Republican bills for skewing the tax benefits to the wealthy,
while fully supporting the centerpiece of the legislation, a huge tax cut for
US corporations.
While there are differences between the House and Senate bills,
both versions adhere to the same basic framework. The corporate tax rate is to
be permanently reduced from the current level of 35 percent to 20 percent,
saving US corporations $2 trillion in taxes and generating an additional $6.7
trillion in revenues over the next decade. The House bill enacts the corporate tax
cut in 2018, while the Senate bill, in order to reduce the projected deficit
from lost federal revenues, delays the corporate tax cut one year, until 2019.
The House bill keeps the top federal tax bracket at 39.6 percent
(down from 70 percent in 1980), but applies it to households making more than
$1 million a year, as compared to the current threshold of $500,000. The Senate
version provides a bigger windfall for the very rich by reducing the top
bracket to 38.5 percent.
Both bills eliminate the alternative minimum tax, which almost
exclusively impacts the wealthy, and they both slash the tax rate on so-called
“pass-through” income reported by business owners.
Each bill allows corporations that have stashed hundreds of
billions of dollars overseas to avoid US taxes, such as Apple and Amazon, to
repatriate their profits at a sharply discounted tax rate even lower than the
new 20 percent corporate rate.
The bills either sharply restrict or eliminate outright the estate
tax, which is currently paid by the wealthiest 0.2 percent of households. The
House bill doubles the exemption for an individual to $11 million and
eliminates the estate tax entirely in 2025. The Senate version doubles the
exemption but does not repeal the tax.
Either way, the change underwrites the right of the richest
households to pass on their wealth to succeeding generations,
institutionalizing the transformation of the United States into an oligarchy,
presided over by a semi-hereditary dynastic caste.
Other boons to business are included in both bills, including an
immediate 100 percent tax write-off for capital investments. Neither bill
eliminates or reduces the so-called “carried interest” loophole that allows
hedge fund, private equity and real estate speculators (such as Donald Trump)
to pay only 20 percent on their income instead of the normal tax rate,
currently almost twice as high.
This is in line with the legislation as whole. While shifting the
tax code to further redistribute the social wealth from the bottom to the top,
it particularly favors the most parasitic sections of the ruling class, those
engaged in financial manipulation.
In order to promote the fiction that the overhaul is geared to the
“middle class,” the bills include certain tax breaks, such as a doubling of the
standard deduction for taxpayers who do not itemize and an increase in the
child tax credit. However, they also rein in or eliminate existing tax
deductions that benefit working class and middle class households.
This is driven above all by the need to keep the total ten-year
deficit resulting from the legislation to $1.5 trillion. That limit must be met
in order to move the tax overhaul on an expedited basis through the Senate,
where the Republicans have only a 52 to 48 majority, ruling out a filibuster
and enabling passage by a simple majority.
The House bill eliminates the federal tax credit for state and
local income and sales taxes, but continues the write-off for state and local
property taxes, capping it at $10,000. It reduces the existing tax reduction on
mortgage interest payments as well as a tax break on medical expenses. It also
eliminates tax credits for student loan payments and imposes a tax on graduate
student stipends. These measures amount to a tax surcharge on workers, young
people and the elderly to help pay for the tax boondoggle for the rich.
The Senate version calls for a somewhat different package of added
tax burdens for the working class and middle class. It eliminates all state and
local tax deductions but retains the tax credits for mortgage interest, student
loan payments and medical expenses.
The Republicans are resorting to brazen
lying to present the legislation as a boon to “hard-working middle class
Americans.” Typical is an op-ed column published Friday in the Washington Post by Orrin Hatch of Utah, the
chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. “For too long, middle-class Americans
have struggled with stagnant wages, sluggish labor markets and economic growth
well below the historic average,” he writes. “It is time to pay attention to
those Americans who have felt left behind in economic stagnation, by providing
tax relief and economic opportunity.”
The line is that corporate America will use the trillions in tax
savings to buy new equipment, build new factories, hire more workers and raise
wages. This ignores the fact that US corporations already have access to cheap
credit, are making bumper profits, and are sitting on trillions of dollars in
cash. It also ignores the past record of tax cuts for big business, whether
under Reagan or George W. Bush, which pushed up stocks and the wealth of the
ruling elite while accelerating the destruction of jobs and working class
living standards. The same lying pretext was used to justify Obama’s bailout of
the banks.
In fact, the extra trillions will be used to buy more and bigger
yachts, private planes, mansions, penthouses, private islands and gated
communities and bribe more politicians to do the bidding of the oligarchs.
One indication of the two-faced character of the Democrats’
opposition is the fact that interest groups backed by Republican billionaires
such as the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson have thus far spent almost $25
million on TV ads to promote the Republican tax plan, while Democratic groups
have spent less than $5 million to oppose the plan.
An updated analysis of the House bill published Wednesday by the
non-partisan tax center spells out in detail how the tax overhaul is designed
to sharply increase the wealth of the richest 5 percent, and especially the
richest 1 percent and 0.1 percent, and vastly increase over the next decade the
concentration of wealth at the very top.
Under the so-called “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” in 2018, taxpayers in
the top 1 percent (with income above $730,000) will receive nearly 21 percent
of the total tax cut, an average of about $37,000, or 2.5 percent of after-tax
income.
Those in the top 5 percent income bracket, and especially the top
1 percent and top 0.1 percent, will get by far the biggest percentage gains in
after-tax income. In other words, if you are among the very rich, the rate of
increase you receive will be far higher than for the lower 95 percent. That
means the plan is designed to widen the gap between the very rich and everybody
else.
In 2018, the top 20 percent of income earners will get 56.6
percent of the total federal tax cut. Within the top 10 percent, the 90-95
percent group will get 7.4 percent of the total, the 95-99 percent group will
receive 14.8 percent, the top 1 percent will get 20.6 percent and the top 0.1
percent will receive 10 percent. In other words, within the richest 10 percent,
the benefits are skewed dramatically to the richest of the rich.
One decade out, by 2027, the transfer of social wealth to the very
rich will be even more pronounced. In 2027, taxpayers in the bottom two
quintiles (those with income less than about $55,000) will see little change in
their taxes, with a tax decrease of $10-$40. Taxpayers in the middle of the
income distribution will see their after-tax incomes increase by only 0.4
percent. Taxpayers in the top 1 percent will receive nearly 50 percent of the
total benefit.
Someone in the top 1 percent will get a break of $52,780. Someone
in the top 0.1 percent will get a tax cut of $278,370.
In total, 12.8 million households will
have a bigger tax bill in 2018 under the law,
including more than three million earning between $48,600 and $86,100. By 2027,
more than 11 million households in this income group will see their tax bills
increase. Overall, by 2027, 47.5 million households, a quarter of the total,
will have a tax increase.
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