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Nations "turbocharge their inequality" when they "let their wealthiest carve generous loopholes in their tax codes," the author writes. (Photo: Joe Brusky/flickr/cc)
Every nation levies taxes. Some nations levy well. In these admirable nations, tax systems spread the tax burden fairly. Those who can readily afford to pay more in taxes do pay more.
Other nations tax poorly. They set low tax rates on high incomes. Officials in these nations let their wealthiest carve generous loopholes in their tax codes. They wink at outright tax evasion.
Nations that go down this sorry second path don't just lose out on revenue they ought to be raising. They turbocharge their inequality. They invite corruption. They poison their civic culture -- and eventually, once enough poison takes hold, crash their economies.
This crashing played out earlier this century most notably in Greece. That nation's economic life essentially collapsed, the Economist business magazine noted six years ago, amid a tax evasion that had evolved into "less an under-the-radar activity, more a social norm."
The Greek wealthy, the Economist observed, established that norm. Greece's most "egregious" tax cheating, researchers had found, "happens higher up the wealth ladder."
The United States hasn't hit -- yet -- the levels of tax evasion that leveled Greece. But we're moving in that direction, ever more deliberately. This past winter saw lawmakers shove us further down this perilous path in two major pieces of legislation.
The first shove came this past December when Congress passed and the President signed into law the GOP "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act." The legislation created no jobs. It did cut tax rates, and munificently so for America's rich and the corporations they own and manage.
But this tax-cut legislation, largely under the radar, also made changes that openly welcome tax evasion.
How so? We know from IRS research that tax evasion flourishes outside the world of W-2s. Only 1 percent of income subject to paycheck withholding, the agency calculates, goes unreported at tax time. By contrast, the share of income that goes unreported from taxpayers who basically self-report their earnings ranges from 16 percent for partnerships to 63 percent for nonfarm proprietors.
That shouldn't surprise anyone. Self-reporting entities, as the Boston Globe's Evan Horowitz points out, have no third party around -- no employer or investment manager -- with a responsibility to pass on income details to the IRS "in a non-self-interested way."
The new GOP tax legislation creates a complex new tax break for these sole proprietorships and other "pass-through" businesses. Pass-throughs -- outfits where profits go directly to owners and get added, at least in theory, to their personal income -- can now deduct 20 percent of their business income before calculating how much they owe Uncle Sam.
This sweet deduction will, naturally, encourage many more taxpayers to reorganize themselves as pass-through operations. By claiming "pass-through" status, they'll get that 20 percent discount. Some will get more. They'll get all sorts of opportunities for underreporting their overall income.
Critics of the GOP tax-cut legislation brought up these underreporting dangers before the bill's passage, and the bill's supporters did insert into the final legislation various clauses designed to prevent richer Americans from exploiting the new pass-through deduction.
But these clauses need to be enforced to be effective, and GOP lawmakers have been doing their best, for quite some time now, to make that enforcement impossible. For almost a quarter-century, they've been demonizing the IRS as a den of thuggish storm troopers out to gouge average Americans, and these relentless GOP attacks have had a major budget impact. Over the past eight years, lawmakers have squeezed about $1 billion -- and 18,000 staff positions -- out of the IRS.
And that brings us to the second step Congress took this winter to keep tax evaders safe and nurture new ones. Earlier this month, with spring fast approaching, lawmakers put the finishing touches on an omnibus federal budget package that leaves the woefully underfinanced IRS woefully underfinanced.
The new budget legislation gives the IRS $77 million less than what the agency requested to implement the tax legislation passed in December. The new budget does increase overall IRS funding, after years of GOP cuts to the agency, but funding for the IRS remains, the Washington Post reports, "down from the $12.1 billion the IRS received in 2010, a year in which the tax collection agency was not tasked with enforcing the biggest overhaul of the federal tax code in several decades."
The most recent IRS study on taxpayer income that's going unreported covers the years 2008 through 2010. That study put the "overall voluntary compliance rate" of American taxpayers at 81.7 percent. Or, to put the matter more starkly, over 18 percent of income nearly a decade ago was evading taxes.
That figure will now likely get significantly worse, and so will inequality, unless we undo what this past winter has wrought.
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Every nation levies taxes. Some nations levy well. In these admirable nations, tax systems spread the tax burden fairly. Those who can readily afford to pay more in taxes do pay more.
Other nations tax poorly. They set low tax rates on high incomes. Officials in these nations let their wealthiest carve generous loopholes in their tax codes. They wink at outright tax evasion.
Nations that go down this sorry second path don't just lose out on revenue they ought to be raising. They turbocharge their inequality. They invite corruption. They poison their civic culture -- and eventually, once enough poison takes hold, crash their economies.
This crashing played out earlier this century most notably in Greece. That nation's economic life essentially collapsed, the Economist business magazine noted six years ago, amid a tax evasion that had evolved into "less an under-the-radar activity, more a social norm."
The Greek wealthy, the Economist observed, established that norm. Greece's most "egregious" tax cheating, researchers had found, "happens higher up the wealth ladder."
The United States hasn't hit -- yet -- the levels of tax evasion that leveled Greece. But we're moving in that direction, ever more deliberately. This past winter saw lawmakers shove us further down this perilous path in two major pieces of legislation.
The first shove came this past December when Congress passed and the President signed into law the GOP "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act." The legislation created no jobs. It did cut tax rates, and munificently so for America's rich and the corporations they own and manage.
But this tax-cut legislation, largely under the radar, also made changes that openly welcome tax evasion.
How so? We know from IRS research that tax evasion flourishes outside the world of W-2s. Only 1 percent of income subject to paycheck withholding, the agency calculates, goes unreported at tax time. By contrast, the share of income that goes unreported from taxpayers who basically self-report their earnings ranges from 16 percent for partnerships to 63 percent for nonfarm proprietors.
That shouldn't surprise anyone. Self-reporting entities, as the Boston Globe's Evan Horowitz points out, have no third party around -- no employer or investment manager -- with a responsibility to pass on income details to the IRS "in a non-self-interested way."
The new GOP tax legislation creates a complex new tax break for these sole proprietorships and other "pass-through" businesses. Pass-throughs -- outfits where profits go directly to owners and get added, at least in theory, to their personal income -- can now deduct 20 percent of their business income before calculating how much they owe Uncle Sam.
This sweet deduction will, naturally, encourage many more taxpayers to reorganize themselves as pass-through operations. By claiming "pass-through" status, they'll get that 20 percent discount. Some will get more. They'll get all sorts of opportunities for underreporting their overall income.
Critics of the GOP tax-cut legislation brought up these underreporting dangers before the bill's passage, and the bill's supporters did insert into the final legislation various clauses designed to prevent richer Americans from exploiting the new pass-through deduction.
But these clauses need to be enforced to be effective, and GOP lawmakers have been doing their best, for quite some time now, to make that enforcement impossible. For almost a quarter-century, they've been demonizing the IRS as a den of thuggish storm troopers out to gouge average Americans, and these relentless GOP attacks have had a major budget impact. Over the past eight years, lawmakers have squeezed about $1 billion -- and 18,000 staff positions -- out of the IRS.
And that brings us to the second step Congress took this winter to keep tax evaders safe and nurture new ones. Earlier this month, with spring fast approaching, lawmakers put the finishing touches on an omnibus federal budget package that leaves the woefully underfinanced IRS woefully underfinanced.
The new budget legislation gives the IRS $77 million less than what the agency requested to implement the tax legislation passed in December. The new budget does increase overall IRS funding, after years of GOP cuts to the agency, but funding for the IRS remains, the Washington Post reports, "down from the $12.1 billion the IRS received in 2010, a year in which the tax collection agency was not tasked with enforcing the biggest overhaul of the federal tax code in several decades."
The most recent IRS study on taxpayer income that's going unreported covers the years 2008 through 2010. That study put the "overall voluntary compliance rate" of American taxpayers at 81.7 percent. Or, to put the matter more starkly, over 18 percent of income nearly a decade ago was evading taxes.
That figure will now likely get significantly worse, and so will inequality, unless we undo what this past winter has wrought.
Every nation levies taxes. Some nations levy well. In these admirable nations, tax systems spread the tax burden fairly. Those who can readily afford to pay more in taxes do pay more.
Other nations tax poorly. They set low tax rates on high incomes. Officials in these nations let their wealthiest carve generous loopholes in their tax codes. They wink at outright tax evasion.
Nations that go down this sorry second path don't just lose out on revenue they ought to be raising. They turbocharge their inequality. They invite corruption. They poison their civic culture -- and eventually, once enough poison takes hold, crash their economies.
This crashing played out earlier this century most notably in Greece. That nation's economic life essentially collapsed, the Economist business magazine noted six years ago, amid a tax evasion that had evolved into "less an under-the-radar activity, more a social norm."
The Greek wealthy, the Economist observed, established that norm. Greece's most "egregious" tax cheating, researchers had found, "happens higher up the wealth ladder."
The United States hasn't hit -- yet -- the levels of tax evasion that leveled Greece. But we're moving in that direction, ever more deliberately. This past winter saw lawmakers shove us further down this perilous path in two major pieces of legislation.
The first shove came this past December when Congress passed and the President signed into law the GOP "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act." The legislation created no jobs. It did cut tax rates, and munificently so for America's rich and the corporations they own and manage.
But this tax-cut legislation, largely under the radar, also made changes that openly welcome tax evasion.
How so? We know from IRS research that tax evasion flourishes outside the world of W-2s. Only 1 percent of income subject to paycheck withholding, the agency calculates, goes unreported at tax time. By contrast, the share of income that goes unreported from taxpayers who basically self-report their earnings ranges from 16 percent for partnerships to 63 percent for nonfarm proprietors.
That shouldn't surprise anyone. Self-reporting entities, as the Boston Globe's Evan Horowitz points out, have no third party around -- no employer or investment manager -- with a responsibility to pass on income details to the IRS "in a non-self-interested way."
The new GOP tax legislation creates a complex new tax break for these sole proprietorships and other "pass-through" businesses. Pass-throughs -- outfits where profits go directly to owners and get added, at least in theory, to their personal income -- can now deduct 20 percent of their business income before calculating how much they owe Uncle Sam.
This sweet deduction will, naturally, encourage many more taxpayers to reorganize themselves as pass-through operations. By claiming "pass-through" status, they'll get that 20 percent discount. Some will get more. They'll get all sorts of opportunities for underreporting their overall income.
Critics of the GOP tax-cut legislation brought up these underreporting dangers before the bill's passage, and the bill's supporters did insert into the final legislation various clauses designed to prevent richer Americans from exploiting the new pass-through deduction.
But these clauses need to be enforced to be effective, and GOP lawmakers have been doing their best, for quite some time now, to make that enforcement impossible. For almost a quarter-century, they've been demonizing the IRS as a den of thuggish storm troopers out to gouge average Americans, and these relentless GOP attacks have had a major budget impact. Over the past eight years, lawmakers have squeezed about $1 billion -- and 18,000 staff positions -- out of the IRS.
And that brings us to the second step Congress took this winter to keep tax evaders safe and nurture new ones. Earlier this month, with spring fast approaching, lawmakers put the finishing touches on an omnibus federal budget package that leaves the woefully underfinanced IRS woefully underfinanced.
The new budget legislation gives the IRS $77 million less than what the agency requested to implement the tax legislation passed in December. The new budget does increase overall IRS funding, after years of GOP cuts to the agency, but funding for the IRS remains, the Washington Post reports, "down from the $12.1 billion the IRS received in 2010, a year in which the tax collection agency was not tasked with enforcing the biggest overhaul of the federal tax code in several decades."
The most recent IRS study on taxpayer income that's going unreported covers the years 2008 through 2010. That study put the "overall voluntary compliance rate" of American taxpayers at 81.7 percent. Or, to put the matter more starkly, over 18 percent of income nearly a decade ago was evading taxes.
That figure will now likely get significantly worse, and so will inequality, unless we undo what this past winter has wrought.
"It is hard to see," said the head of the Committee to Protect Journalists, "if Israel can wipe out an entire news crew without the international community so much as batting an eye, what will stop further attacks on reporters."
Nearly two years into Israel's assault on Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces' killing of six journalists this week provoked worldwide outrage—but a leading press freedom advocate said Wednesday that the slaughter of the Palestinian reporters can "hardly" be called surprising, considering the international community's refusal to stop Israel from killing hundreds of journalists and tens of thousands of other civilians in Gaza since October 2023.
Israel claimed without evidence that Anas al-Sharif, a prominent Al Jazeera journalist who was killed in an airstrike Sunday along with four of his colleagues at the network and a freelance reporter, was the leader of a Hamas cell—an allegation Al Jazeera, the United Nations, and rights groups vehemently denied.
Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of the Committee to Protect Journalists, wrote in The Guardian that al-Sharif was one of at least 26 Palestinian reporters that Israel has admitted to deliberately targeting while presenting "no independently verifiable evidence" that they were militants or involved in hostilities in any way.
Israel did not publish the "current intelligence" it claimed to have showing al-Sharif was a Hamas operative, and Ginsberg outlined how the IDF appeared to target al-Sharif after he drew attention to the starvation of Palestinians—which human rights groups and experts have said is the direct result of Israel's near-total blockade on humanitarian aid.
"The Committee to Protect Journalists had seen this playbook from Israel before: a pattern in which journalists are accused by Israel of being terrorists with no credible evidence," wrote Ginsberg, noting the CPJ demanded al-Sharif's protection last month as Israel's attacks intensified.
The five other journalists who were killed when the IDF struck a press tent in Gaza City were not accused of being militants.
The IDF "has not said what crime it believes the others have committed that would justify killing them," wrote Ginsberg. "The laws of war are clear: Journalists are civilians. To target them deliberately in war is to commit a war crime."
"It is hardly surprising that Israel believes it can get away with murder. In the two decades preceding October, Israeli forces killed 20 journalists."
Just as weapons have continued flowing from the United States and other Western countries to Israel despite its killing of at least 242 Palestinian journalists and more than 61,000 other civilians since October 2023, Ginsberg noted, Israel had reason to believe it could target reporters even before the IDF began its current assault on Gaza.
"It is hardly surprising that Israel believes it can get away with murder," wrote Ginsberg. "In the two decades preceding October, Israeli forces killed 20 journalists. No one has ever been held accountable for any of those deaths, including that of the Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, whose killing in 2022 sent shock waves through the region."
The reaction to the killing of the six journalists this week from the Trump administration—the largest international funder of the Israeli military—and the corporate media in the U.S. has exemplified what Ginsberg called the global community's "woeful" response to the slaughter of journalists by Israel, which has long boasted of its supposed status as a bastion of press freedom in the Middle East.
As Middle East Eye reported Tuesday, at the first U.S. State Department briefing since al-Sharif and his colleagues were killed, spokesperson Tammy Bruce said the airstrike targeting journalists was a legitimate attack by "a nation fighting a war" and repeated Israel's unsubstantiated claims about al-Sharif.
"I will remind you again that we're dealing with a complicated, horrible situation," she told a reporter from Al Jazeera Arabic. "We refer you to Israel. Israel has released evidence al-Sharif was part of Hamas and was supportive of the Hamas attack on October 7. They're the ones who have the evidence."
A CNN anchor also echoed Israel's allegations of terrorism in an interview with Foreign Press Association president Ian Williams, prompting the press freedom advocate to issue a reminder that—even if Israel's claims were true—journalists are civilians under international law, regardless of their political beliefs and affiliations.
"Frankly, I don't care whether al-Sharif was in Hamas or not," said Williams. "We don't kill journalists for being Republicans or Democrats or, in Britain, Labour Party."
Ginsberg warned that even "our own journalism community" across the world has thus far failed reporters in Gaza—now the deadliest war for journalists that CPJ has ever documented—compared to how it has approached other conflicts.
"Whereas the Committee to Protect Journalists received significant offers of support and solidarity when journalists were being killed in Ukraine at the start of Russia's full-scale invasion, the reaction from international media over the killings of our journalist colleagues in Gaza at the start of the war was muted at best," said Ginsberg.
International condemnation has "grown more vocal" following the killing of al-Sharif and his colleagues, including Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal, Moamen Aliwa, and Mohammad al-Khaldi, said Ginsberg.
"But it is hard to see," she said, "if Israel can wipe out an entire news crew without the international community so much as batting an eye, what will stop further attacks on reporters."
Three U.N. experts on Tuesday demanded an immediate independent investigation into the journalists' killing, saying that a refusal from Israel to allow such a probe would "reconfirm its own culpability and cover-up of the genocide."
"Journalism is not terrorism. Israel has provided no credible evidence of the latter against any of the journalists that it has targeted and killed with impunity," said the experts, including Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.
"These are acts of an arrogant army that believes itself to be impune, no matter the gravity of the crimes it commits," they said. "The impunity must end. The states that continue to support Israel must now place tough sanctions against its government in order to end the killings, the atrocities, and the mass starvation."
Fire-related deaths were reported in Turkey, Spain, Montenegro, and Albania.
With firefighters in southern Europe battling blazes that have killed people in multiple countries and forced thousands to evacuate, Spain's environment minister on Wednesday called the wildfires a "clear warning" of the climate emergency driven by the fossil fuel industry.
While authorities have cited a variety of causes for current fires across the continent, from arson to "careless farming practices, improperly maintained power cables, and summer lightning storms," scientists have long stressed that wildfires are getting worse as humanity heats the planet with fossil fuels.
The Spanish minister, Sara Aagesen, told the radio network Cadena SER that "the fires are one of the parts of the impact of that climate change, which is why we have to do all we can when it comes to prevention."
"Our country is especially vulnerable to climate change. We have resources now but, given that the scientific evidence and the general expectation point to it having an ever greater impact, we need to work to reinforce and professionalize those resources," Aagesen added in remarks translated by The Guardian.
The Spanish meteorological agency, AEMET, said on social media Wednesday that "the danger of wildfires continues at very high or extreme levels in most of Spain, despite the likelihood of showers in many areas," and urged residents to "take extreme precautions!"
The heatwave impacting Spain "peaked on Tuesday with temperatures as high as 45°C (113°F)," according to Reuters. AEMET warned that "starting Thursday, the heat will intensify again," and is likely to continue through Monday.
The heatwave is also a sign of climate change, Akshay Deoras, a research scientist in the Meteorology Department at the U.K.'s University of Reading, told Agence France-Presse this week.
"Thanks to climate change, we now live in a significantly warmer world," Deoras said, adding that "many still underestimate the danger."
There have been at least two fire-related deaths in Spain this week: a man working at a horse stable on the outskirts of the Spanish capital Madrid, and a 35-year-old volunteer firefighter trying to make firebreaks near the town of Nogarejas, in the Castile and León region.
Acknowledging the firefighter's death on social media Tuesday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez sent his "deepest condolences to their family, friends, and colleagues," and wished "much strength and a speedy recovery to the people injured in that same fire."
According to The New York Times, deaths tied to the fires were also reported in Turkey, Montenegro, and Albania. Additionally, The Guardian noted, "a 4-year-old boy who was found unconscious in his family's car in Sardinia died in Rome on Monday after suffering irreversible brain damage caused by heatstroke."
There are also fires in Greece, France, and Portugal, where the mayor of Vila Real, Alexandre Favaios, declared that "we are being cooked alive, this cannot continue."
Reuters on Wednesday highlighted Greenpeace estimates that investing €1 billion, or $1.17 billion, annually in forest management could save 9.9 million hectares or 24.5 million acres—an area bigger than Portugal—and tens of billions of euros spent on firefighting and restoration work.
The European fires are raging roughly three months out from the next United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP30, which is scheduled to begin on November 10 in Belém, Brazil.
"These are not abstract numbers," wrote National Education Association president Becky Pringle. "These are real children who show up to school eager to learn but are instead distracted by hunger."
The leader of the largest teachers union in the United States is sounding the alarm over the impact that President Donald Trump's newly enacted budget law will have on young students, specifically warning that massive cuts to federal nutrition assistance will intensify the nation's child hunger crisis.
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association (NEA)—which represents millions of educators across the U.S.—wrote for Time magazine earlier this week that "as families across America prepare for the new school year, millions of children face the threat of returning to classrooms without access to school meals" under the budget measure that Trump signed into law last month after it cleared the Republican-controlled Congress.
Estimates indicate that more than 18 million children nationwide could lose access to free school meals due to the law's unprecedented cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid, which are used to determine eligibility for free meals in most U.S. states.
The Trump-GOP budget law imposes more strict work-reporting requirements on SNAP recipients and expands the mandates to adults between the ages of 55 and 64 and parents with children aged 14 and older. The Congressional Budget Office said earlier this week that the more aggressive work requirements would kick millions of adults off SNAP over the next decade—with cascading effects for children and other family members who rely on the program.
"Educators see this pain every day, and that's why they go above and beyond—buying classroom snacks with their own money—to support their students."
Pringle wrote in her Time op-ed that "our children can't learn if they are hungry," adding that as a middle school science teacher she has seen first-hand "the pain that hunger creates."
"Educators see this pain every day, and that's why they go above and beyond—buying classroom snacks with their own money—to support their students," she wrote.
The NEA president warned that cuts from the Trump-GOP law "will hit hardest in places where families are already struggling the most, especially in rural and Southern states where school nutrition programs are a lifeline to many."
"In Texas, 3.4 million kids, nearly two-thirds of students, are eligible for free and reduced lunch," Pringle wrote. "In Mississippi, 439,000 kids, 99.7% of the student population, were eligible for free and reduced-cost lunch during the 2022-23 school year."
"These are not abstract numbers," she added. "These are real children who show up to school eager to learn but are instead distracted by hunger and uncertainty about when they will eat again. America's kids deserve better.
Pringle's op-ed came as school leaders, advocates, and lawmakers across the country braced for the impacts of Trump's budget law.
"We're going to see cuts to programs such as SNAP and Medicaid, resulting in domino effects for the children we serve," Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) said during a recent gathering of lawmakers and experts. "For many of our communities, these policies mean life or death."