Taxes, Transparency, and Our Opaque Opulent

[marmar]

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:




Taxes, Transparency, and Our Opaque Opulent
February 26, 2011

Mega-millionaire residents of Manhattan’s finest luxury towers pay less of their income in federal taxes than the janitors in their towers do. Once upon a time, we had a law that discouraged that distinction.

By Sam Pizzigati


How much of their mega-million incomes did the billionaire Koch brothers — the secretive right-wingers who’ve been busily bankrolling Wisconsin’s now infamous governor Scott Walker — pay in federal taxes last year?

We have simply no idea. The IRS closely guards the confidentiality of income tax returns. So we have no way of knowing exactly what the Koch brothers reported in income for last year or how much — or little — of that they paid in taxes.



The U.S. Census Bureau guards rich people’s privacy even more zealously. The annual Census income reports have, in fact. essentially become useless — as snapshots of income at our nation’s economic summit — because the Census folks, as the Congressional Budget Office noted earlier this month, do not even “report an individual’s earnings if they exceed a certain level.”

The Census Bureau, instead, only reports how many Americans make above that level, not how much they make. The result? We know from Census annual reports exactly how many Americans make between $50,000 and $100,000. But we have no clue how many make between $500 million and a billion. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://toomuchonline.org/taxes-and-transparency-our-opaque-opulent/