The revelation last week that the 25 richest US billionaires have paid very little tax even as their fortunes have soared has reignited demands for wealth taxes on both sides of the Atlantic.
An unprecedented leak of “a vast trove” of 15 years of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data to the investigative news site ProPublica has provided a staggering insight into the legal strategies the very rich deploy to avoid tax.
It discovered that Jeff Bezos – founder of Amazon and world’s richest person, with a $193bn (£136bn) fortune – paid no federal taxes in 2011 and even claimed $4,000 in tax credit for his children.
The second wealthiest person – the head of Tesla, Elon Musk – paid no tax in 2018 because he took out vast loans against his shareholdings and deducted the interest costs he paid on the loans from his taxes. » | Rupert Neate | Saturday, June 12, 2021
