Tax Cheating? It's Not Just The Trumps.
In radio shows and talks from London to Boston to Richmond, Ind., people keep asking me how the Trump family got away with stealing a half billion dollars, in today’s money, from our government, as The New York Times reported last month.
One big part of the answer is that Congress showers real estate investors with tax benefits. It also makes auditing many types of real estate transactions incredibly tedious and time-consuming. Combine that with years of budget cuts and what we get is an IRS—the federal Tax Police Department—that is well suited to pursuing the financial equivalent of tricycle thefts, but not larceny on a billionaire scale.
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Separate and Unequal Taxation
The story of how the Trumps got away with what The Times called “outright fraud” begins with understanding that America has two systems of individual income taxation, separate and unequal.
One system relies on independent verification. It covers all workers, pensioners and, in the last decade thanks in part to my work, stock market investors. The other system is based on trust. Congress does not trust workers, but it assumes that people who run businesses are honest, so there is no need to independently verify the income they report.
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There is little cheating under that efficient and effective system, which is mostly automated. Indeed, 99% of income taxes due on wages are collected and turned over, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, reported last year.
https://www.dcreport.org/2018/11/01/tax-cheating-its-not-just-the-trumps/
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