Democrats Latest Plan: Target Middle Class Americans with IRS Audits, Keep Billionaire Loopholes Open
A bill backed by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) would unleash the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on middle class Americans while keeping tax loopholes open for billionaires and their multinational corporations.
The plan, which Schumer and Manchin have agreed to, would massively bulk up IRS audits and criminal investigations to the sum of tens of billions of dollars — nearly all of which will be dedicated to going after middle class Americans squeezed by inflation.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board details the scheme:
The bill earmarks $45.6 billion for “enforcement,” including “litigation,” “criminal investigations,” “investigative technology,” “digital asset monitoring” and a new fleet of tax-collector cars. The result will be far more audits, civil suits and criminal referrals. [Emphasis added]
The main targets will by necessity be the middle- and upper-middle class because that’s where the money is. The Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s official tax scorekeeper, says that from 78% to 90% of the money raised from under-reported income would likely come from those making less than $200,000 a year. Only 4% to 9% would come from those making more than $500,000. [Emphasis added]
The IRS knows the super-wealthy employ lawyers and accountants who make litigation time-consuming and risky. It also knows that Democrats would howl if the agency pursues fraud in the earned-income tax credit program, despite what the IRS has estimated are $18 billion in improper payments each year. [Emphasis added]
At the same time, tax provisions hugely benefitting billionaires and their multinational corporations would go untouched.
The Schumer-Manchin plan includes billions in green energy tax credits that would be swooped up by billionaires to cut their corporations’ annual tax burdens. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon notoriously employs this strategy to pay close to zero in corporate income taxes.
Breitbart News’s John Carney writes:
Amazon’s tax bills were part of the inspiration for a minimum tax. The company faced no federal corporate income tax liability in 2017 and 2018. In the years since, it has had an effective tax rate that is just a fraction of the 21 percent rate put in place by the Trump administration’s tax reforms. According to the calculations of Matthew Gardner of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, over the past four years Amazon’s effective aggregate tax rate was just 5.1 percent. [Emphasis added]
…
While the alternate minimum tax would prevent companies from using deductions for capital investments or stock-based compensation, it continues to allow them to use tax credits, Daniel Bunn of the Tax Foundation told us. In fact, the bill includes hundreds of billions of dollars worth of new tax credits aimed at fostering green technology adoption. And Amazon plays in beast mode when it comes to using tax credits to reduce its tax bill. [Emphasis added]
Jeff Bezo’s retail giant said in its annual report that tax credits reduced the taxes it would have otherwise owed by $1.1 billion. The company has said that most of those tax credits are federal research and development credits, although it does not give much detail in its annual reports. The Manchin-Schumer tax bill would not touch this. Amazon will lose the benefit of the write-off for stock-based compensation, but the company will most likely at least partially offset that by using the green tech tax credits. The end result could be no change in Amazon’s tax rate. [Emphasis added]
President Joe Biden and House Democrats tried to pass a similar tax plan last year as part of the administration’s “Build Back Better” agenda that has failed to catch on in Congress.
That plan would have targeted an additional nearly 600,000 working and middle class Americans earning less than $75,000 a year with IRS audits. Of those new IRS audits, more than 313,000 would have targeted the poorest of Americans who earn $25,000 or less a year.
Similar to the Schumer-Manchin bill, Biden’s plan would have provided a $625 billion tax cut for the wealthiest Americans living in blue states — paid for by working and middle class Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Breitbart Business Digest: Manchin’s Tax Hike Does Not Touch Amazon’s Biggest Tax Break
Amazon is not sweating the corporate tax hike in the Joe Manchin-approved climate spending bill.
The deceptively named Inflation Reduction Act would impose an alternative minimum tax on companies with over $1 billion in financial profits. It levies a 15 percent tax on financial account income, the kind that gets reported to investors in quarterly and annual company filings.
Amazon’s tax bills were part of the inspiration for a minimum tax. The company faced no federal corporate income tax liability in 2017 and 2018. In the years since, it has had an effective tax rate that is just a fraction of the 21 percent rate put in place by the Trump administration’s tax reforms. According to the calculations of Matthew Gardner of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, over the past four years Amazon’s effective aggregate tax rate was just 5.1 percent.
Last year, President Joe Biden singled out Amazon’s ability to avoid paying more in taxes, saying it was “just wrong” that a company so profitable could pay so little. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has made Amazon her personal tax piñata, frequently saying the company should be required to pay much more in taxes. When Sens. Warren, Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Angus King (I-ME) proposed a similar 15 percent minimum tax last year, they specifically said they were targeting Amazon.
The day Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) announced he had reached a deal with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to raise taxes and hike spending on climate change pork, Amazon’s shares were trading around $121. On Wednesday, they closed above $134, a ten percent gain in less than a week. Amazon reported earnings that beat Wall Street’s expectations during that week, which explains the jump. But it does not seem like investors are worried that Amazon may soon face a tax bill three times larger than in recent years.
There’s good reason for that. While the alternate minimum tax would prevent companies from using deductions for capital investments or stock-based compensation, it continues to allow them to use tax credits, Daniel Bunn of the Tax Foundation told us. In fact, the bill includes hundreds of billions of dollars worth of new tax credits aimed at fostering green technology adoption. And Amazon plays in beast mode when it comes to using tax credits to reduce its tax bill.
Jeff Bezo’s retail giant said in its annual report that tax credits reduced the taxes it would have otherwise owed by $1.1 billion. The company has said that most of those tax credits are federal research and development credits, although it does not give much detail in its annual reports. The Manchin-Schumer tax bill would not touch this. Amazon will lose the benefit of the write-off for stock-based compensation, but the company will most likely at least partially offset that by using the green tech tax credits. The end result could be no change in Amazon’s tax rate.
It’s possible that Amazon’s tax rate could even fall if it aggressively cashes in on the climate change tax credits.
Amazon Hires Senior Senate Aide, Boosting Efforts to Stymie New Tech Antitrust Bill
Anna Edgerton, Leah Nylen and Emily Birnbaum
Amazon denies sick leave to pregnant worker hospitalized with COVID-19
Work at Amazon? Make your voice heard: Fill out the form at the end and tell us about conditions at your workplace. Comments will be published anonymously.
It has been nearly three months since Amazon announced the end to COVID-19 paid sick leave, daily text alerts for positive cases and other basic public health policies.
At the time, the corporation claimed that the “sustained easing of the pandemic,” along with vaccines and other treatments, made it possible to cease its public health protocols. Amazon officials hypocritically called for workers to “continue taking the necessary precautions to protect themselves, their loved ones, and their communities.”
Writing at the time of the dismantling of sick pay for COVID-19, the WSWS International Amazon Workers Voice (IAWV) explained, “Amazon’s rollback of safety measures to pre-COVID-19 levels will only intensify the pandemic and accelerate the spread of the disease.” This has been borne out in reality.
The IAWV was recently contacted by a pregnant Amazon worker from Baltimore, Maryland, who described the corporation’s drive to maintain profits at the expense of the health of workers.
The worker, who is several months pregnant and tested positive earlier in July for COVID-19, told the IAWV that the corporation denied her appeals for sick leave, despite her symptoms being so severe that she was hospitalized.
“My symptoms started on the 19th,” explained the worker, “J,” who asked that her name be withheld out of fear of retaliation. “I was at work, I kept feeling a scratching sensation in my throat that gradually got worse.” After speaking to her supervisors, J was sent to the company’s in-house medical provider, Amcare.
“The doctors there barely even checked me,” she said. “They kept their distance as they told me to open my mouth so they could see my throat (without a light or anything) then told me I was fine and to go back to work.”
The IAWV has written previously about Amazon’s company-owned health service, which is notorious for its unwillingness to prescribe care which may undercut Amazon’s drive for productivity, as well as for its employment of unqualified personnel.
The worker had recently been moved from her position in stow, which she said was too physically demanding for her to keep up with. “Managers started getting more strict on me for going to the bathroom more often and getting more tired,” she said.
Instead, she took a position as a picker, which was less physically demanding. According to Warehouse Ninja, stowing involves “the process of storing incoming inventory into an appropriate storage location for future retrieval.” It is one of the most common jobs found in an Amazonian warehouse.
An internal Amazon health and wellness memo that was leaked last year to Motherboard stated that the average stower is expected to burn at least 400 calories an hour. Tech publication the Verdict commented that this hourly rate is equivalent to “the sort of work performed by galley slaves in olden times,” who burned 451 calories an hour while “[r]owing at a sustainable rate.”
“I then kept feeling very weak later on in the night and they wouldn’t allow me to go home and made me work my full shift,” J continued. The next morning she went to the hospital and tested positive for COVID-19.
Despite the seriousness of this situation, J was denied entry to a bed. “I then waited in the waiting room for 12 hours and was told they couldn’t do anything for me,” she said. “The first hospital I went to denied me a room because they said they were focusing more on the ‘severe patients’ and said I didn’t fall under that category.”
“I went home and a couple days later I had to go back to another hospital and get multiple tests done because I got worse,” she added.
As the BA.5 Omicron subvariant—the most transmissible version of the virus yet—has become dominant, COVID hospitalizations have tripled since the most recent ebb in mid-April. This has resulted in a situation in which a mother-to-be is unable to find a hospital room after testing positive for COVID-19, a potentially life-threatening illness.
J’s difficulties were only just starting. “I was told by Amazon my leave was accepted the day I requested it. Today, a week later, they told me it was denied even though I had all the proof they asked for about me having COVID.”
J continued, “I called the [Employee Resource Center], contacted [Human Resources] and made cases about my situation and they all told me it wasn’t enough proof.”
The worker provided the IAWV with screenshots of a doctor’s note from a MedStar Health patient portal stating she was positive for COVID-19 and needed to be isolated “to make sure you do not infect anyone else.” Despite this, Amazon “still denied it, saying it wasn’t enough.”
J currently has a pending appeal for sick leave open with the company. “I can barely even do anything. When I get up to try and do something in my house my heart rate jumps up to 115-130. … When my heart rate goes up my oxygen levels also go down. When I was in the hospital they said my oxygen would go down to a very dangerous level and had to do breathing treatments on me,” she explained.
J emphasized that her child was “thankfully fine,” but she wasn’t. “[The hospital] did a CAT scan on me and found something in my lungs which also made the doctors decide I need to continue with my quarantine until things cleared up.”
“A lot of people at Amazon are still testing positive for COVID,” she explained. “They lifted the mask mandate there and now they’re putting in more tables [in our break rooms] so people are closer together,” she said. “It’s like COVID no longer exists to them there.”
Amazon’s effort to force the pregnant worker back to work while hospitalized occurs just over two weeks since an Amazonian died in a warehouse in Carteret, New Jersey, during Prime Week. A recent article in the Daily Beast reported that 42-year old Rafael Reynaldo Mota Frias was “a hard-working dad from… who ‘was everything to this family.’”
Cynically, Amazon spokespeople last week waved off claims that Frias had died due to work-related causes as “rumors.” Instead, the company claimed the worker, who collapsed during a heart attack amid temperatures exceeding 90 degrees Fahrenheit, died as a result of a “personal medical condition.”
Situations such as J’s confirm the importance of the decision made by Amazon workers in Baltimore in 2020 to form an independent rank-and-file safety committee in order to protect their fellow Amazonians and save lives.
The group’s founding statement declared: “[O]ur goal is to expose the conditions at our facility and the lies of management meant to cover them up. We are an organization of, for, and led by Amazon workers which will defend the rights and safety of our fellow employees.”
It is vital for Amazon workers to demand that Amazon provides the resources and necessary sick leave to all of its employees infected with COVID-19, as well serious measures to stop the spread of COVID in the warehouses and assert workers’ oversight over safety more broadly. A network of rank-and-file committees throughout Amazon’s operations will provide the means to fight for these and other demands.
Jeff Bezos’ Megayacht Forced to Flee in Middle of Night to Escape Egging from Locals
The controversial megayacht of Amazon’s climate-crazy boss Jeff Bezos appears to have avoided an egging while sneaking through Rotterdam.
The incomplete megayacht of Amazon tsar and notorious climate crazy Jeff Bezos appears to have managed to sneak through Rotterdam last night without being egged, despite having drummed up massive controversy over plans to dismantle a city landmark to get the huge craft out to sea earlier this year.
Soon to be the largest megayacht ever built, the vessel earned the ire of local Rotterdammers after it was announced that a historic bridge would have to be partially dismantled to allow the ship built in a local yard to reach the sea due to the ship’s abnormally large masts, with many locals threatening to egg the vessel as it travelled through the city.
While this plan was subsequently dropped, according to a report by specialist website Schuttevaer, it appears that significant care was nevertheless taken to transport the vessel without upsetting the locals, with the incomplete ship reportedly taking an unusual, longer route to another shipyard, piquing the interests of enthusiasts.
The vessel is also reported to have started its journey at 3am, traversing through the dead of night to reach the Greenport Rotterdam Shipyard, where it is due to be completed.
People filming the unfinished ship’s maiden voyage meanwhile describe having searchlights aimed at them by workers, seemingly in an attempt to prevent them from filming or taking pictures.
“When I was standing on one of the bridges, they shined a searchlight on me, so it wasn’t easy for me to take pictures,” Der Spiegel reports one enthusiast as saying, who speculated that the strange route the ship took, as well as the time of the transfer, were both intentional to avoid pictures being taken of the vessel.
Also notable about reporting surrounding the launch of Bezos’ superyacht is that it seemingly appears to have avoided being egged by protesters, something that might have been at least partially avoided — despite previous threats — due to the time of the transfer.
This is also perhaps partly due to the fact that the ship avoided going near Rotterdam’s city centre entirely, despite initial plans involving the ship taking such a route, and even requiring the city’s famous Hef bridge to be dismantled so that the 130ft tall ship could pass through.
“Calling all Rotterdammers, take a box of (rotten) eggs with you and let’s throw them en masse at Jeff’s superyacht when it sails through the Hef in Rotterdam,” a Facebook event page advertising the protest previously read.
“Rotterdam was built from the rubble by the people of Rotterdam, and we don’t just take that apart for the phallus symbol of a megalomaniac billionaire,” it continued. “Not without a fight!”
Meanwhile, despite making various pronouncements about climate change, Bezos’ crowning jewel, Amazon, has seen its carbon emissions spike in 2021, growing by nearly one-fifth over 2020.
This is on top of a previous 40 per cent rise in emissions between 2019 and 2020, something that was seemingly brought about by the company’s surging business during COVID-19.
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