From MSN Money: How the rich pay no taxes

[Better Believe It]

How the rich pay no taxes
Eleven shelters, dodges, and rolls -- all perfectly legal -- used by America's wealthiest people.
By Jesse Drucker
April 11, 2011

For the well-off, this could be the best tax day since the early 1930s: Top tax rates on ordinary income, dividends, estates, and gifts will remain at or near historically low levels for at least the next two years. That's thanks in part to legislation passed in December 2010 by the 111th Congress and signed by President Barack Obama.

"This is clearly far and away the most generous tax situation that's existed," says Gregory D. Singer, a national managing director of the wealth management group at AllianceBernstein (AB) in New York. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

For the 400 U.S. taxpayers with the highest adjusted gross income, the effective federal income tax rate -- what they actually pay -- fell from almost 30 percent in 1995 to just under 17 percent in 2007, according to the IRS. And for the approximately 1.4 million people who make up the top 1 percent of taxpayers, the effective federal income tax rate dropped from 29 percent to 23 percent in 2008. It may seem too fantastic to be true, but the top 400 end up paying a lower rate than the next 1,399,600 or so.

The true effective rate for multimillionaires is actually far lower than that indicated by official government statistics. That's because those figures fail to include the additional income that's generated by many sophisticated tax-avoidance strategies. Several of those techniques involve some variation of complicated borrowings that never get repaid, netting the beneficiaries hundreds of millions in tax-free cash. From 2003 to 2008, for example, Los Angeles Dodgers owner and real estate developer Frank H. McCourt Jr. paid no federal or state regular income taxes, as stated in court records dug up by the Los Angeles Times. Developers such as McCourt, according to a declaration in his divorce proceeding, "typically fund their lifestyle through lines of credit and loan proceeds secured by their assets while paying little or no personal income taxes." A spokesman for McCourt said he availed himself of a tax code provision at the time that permitted purchasers of sports franchises to defer income taxes.

Read the full article at:

http://money.msn.com/taxes/latest.aspx?post=26d490bd-7317-4f93-8b43-e1da1151ea5f>1=33005

And now the super rich want yet another round of even deeper tax cuts in order to "balance the budget" and "create jobs".

What bull shit!

To Democrats in Congress and the White House.

Just say fricken NO! BBI

[Turbineguy]

1. Didn't you get the memo?

Taxes are for little people.

[GreenTea]

2. And use their corporations to expand fascism...."Reclaiming democracy from the corrupting effects

of undue corporate influence by amending the United States Constitution to establish that:

1. Only human beings, not corporations, are entitled to constitutional rights, and

2. Money is not speech, and therefore regulating political contributions and spending is not equivalent to limiting political speech."

http://rawstory.com/

[inna]

3. at least it's clear who the owners are and who's really running the country

[cui bono]

4. The key pieces of information:

"passed in December 2010 by the 111th Congress" and "signed by President Barack Obama".

Why do we think they are on our side?

[Curmudgeoness]

5. Is there any doubt why we have a budget deficit?

We don't have a debt problem, we have a revenue problem. And I am not seeing any answers. I was talking to a small business owner who did not believe me when I told him that the tax rates in the past were much higher than they are today. He called me a liar when I told him that the highest rates were over 90% at some times in the US history. So we are not just fighting against the money-grubbing wealthy, we are fighting against ignorance. Lots of luck to us.

[notesdev]

6. This is what I keep trying to explain to the reflexive tax hikers

The wealthy have the money to dodge any tax you can dream up, and that tax designed for the rich ends up being another tax on the middle class. It's tax deductions which are the problem, not the tax rate.

Same goes for corporate tax. Now that Japan is lowering its own, the USA has the highest corporate tax rate in the world. Yet huge companies (GE, BoA) pay nothing at all! "It's the deductions, stupid" should be the mantra of tax reform.

Now why won't any politician touch them? Social Security is on the table now, why shouldn't, say, the mortgage interest deduction? Or charity deductions (where many of them are not charity by any reasonable definition at all)? Or any of a thousand other things that have been decreed as fiscally virtuous behavior (by the most corrupt process imaginable) and thus incented by the tax code?

[Better Believe It]

7. The only tax deductions the ruling rich will end are those that benefit average working folks.

Like the mortgage interest deduction.

And the wealthy write the tax code.

We don't.

It's all about class.

[notesdev]

8. The mortgage interest deduction doesn't benefit average working folks

That's a myth. It benefits the banks. All the benefit that the borrower allegedly gets simply gets tacked on to the price of what he buys in the form of a higher rate. The borrower never sees any real benefit from it. Moreover, the average working folks have been greatly harmed, not helped, by the excessive incentive to take on debt that that deduction represents.

It's not about class, it's about power. Regular folks have the power to change the status quo, but we must first refuse to continue to accept it, and start thinking in ways unapproved by the establishment.