This article first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Hey, I’d happily host a weekly BBQ at my house if it meant I got a $500,000 tax refund every year. But such benefits only go to the superrich, who own this fucking country and everything in it. I guess we should just be grateful they even allow us to live here at all.
Another way the system is rigged. We knew it. We just didn’t know how they did it.
Propublica does their usual good job on this report but it’s really a story of trying to close the barn door after (most of) the horses have escaped: “meaningful rule changes” require political will and that is for sale so rules that are virtually unenforceable or allow ready skirting by anyone who can afford the accountants and lawyers become the norm.
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” ― Frédéric Bastiat
ETA: Thomas Piketty explores this in detail but the (real) short version is that income inequality is still growing as the wealthy have succeeded in resurrecting the status and power of aristocracy via corporate, foundation, estate and trust law with the bonus that divisibility of modern financial assets now allows lesser scions of noble houses access to the same legally protected, intergenerational trough that was once the exclusive right of firstborn.
“I don’t mind being a team player. I’m just tired of being the soccer ball.” ― Quentin R. Bufogle, Horse Latitudes
I learned about Carolands when SFGate reported on a true crime story that occurred on the property. https://www.sfgate.com/sfhistory/article/california-gilded-age-mansion-carolands-17441886.php
You mean that this kind of information is new? The tax that we all worry about in April is full of these kind of exemptions. Why do you think that Harvard has 30 billion in the bank?
BTW make sure you pay tax on those tips.
Well, gee…Who else would do all the work that produces the riches that these assholes are salting away?
Worked for several decades in a high-end ski resort location. Interacted with many well-heeled customers who related some great stories about taking turns attending each others’ tax-exempt soirees.
Sounds like a shameful way to spend life but apparently worked well for those exhibiting no sense of shame whatsoever.
And they wear their so-called Christianity like a cloak, parading their piety.
If money is your god, there is no shame in cheating to achieve holiness.
Who could have guessed that some filthy rich republican donors are just a bunch of lying dead beat parasites.
Nice article, but only focuses on one side of the tax equation - the income tax side. It’s missing the capital gains tax play. With the example of the first property, going from $25M to to $130M - if you sold this, you’d have to pay capital gains tax on the $100M, so as it’s in California, $30M or so. But you get a tax break on highly appreciated assets given to charity, so you don’t pay the capital gains tax.
So this gift wipes out the $30M in capital gains that would be owed, and allows the full assessed value of $130M to be set against income - the initial $25M of the property gets them ~$70M in tax credits. Nice if you can make it work.
It’s actually more about meaningful rule enforcement. Pretty sure that only allowing a few people to see your non-profit museum would fall well afoul of the intention of the law if civil cases were filed in Federal court by the IRS. The thing is that the IRS folks may have bigger fish to fry than this. I mean, that’s the theory anyways, right?
OT?
" All told, a 2017 study found that 38 colleges had more students from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 60 percent."
I think it’s more that the IRS has been starved of resources for decades, and the super-rich have the resources to defend cases like this. So an IRS manager can decide to spend millions of dollars litigatiing all the way to the supremes (and possibly getting shot down by the Gang) while putting their job in the crosshairs of congressional hearings. Or they can go after smaller fry.
Yep. That appears to be how the system works by design.