Billionaires like Musk and Bezos taking

decision for all of humaity.

In 2018, Tesla's founder and the world's second-richest person, Elon Musk, also did
not pay any federal income taxes. ProPublica has obtained a significant amount of
information about the tax returns of thousands of the nation's wealthiest individuals
from the Internal Revenue Service over the course of more than 15 years. The data
reveal the financial lives of American titans like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert
Murdoch, and Mark Zuckerberg in a way that has never been seen before. In addition
to their income and taxes, it shows their investments, stock trades, gambling
winnings, and even audit results.

Many Americans live paycheck to paycheck and accumulate little wealth by paying
the federal government a percentage of their income that rises as they earn more. A
household in the United States had a median annual income of approximately
$70,000 in recent years and paid 14% of federal taxes. This year, couples with wages
more noteworthy than $628,300 were dependent upon the most elevated personal
expense rate, which was 37%. ProPublica was able to get their hands on private tax
records, which show that the very wealthy are able to get around this system.

Their wealth derives from the skyrocketing value of their property and stock. Until
the tycoons sell, US regulation doesn't characterize those increases as available pay.
To document the financial realities of the richest Americans, ProPublica conducted
an investigation that had never been done before. We analyzed the yearly charges
paid by the 25 most extravagant Americans to the Forbes gauge of how much their
abundance expanded during that equivalent time span.

They paid $13.6 billion in federal income taxes over those five years, according to
IRS data. A completely different picture is presented by middle-class Americans,
such as wage earners in their early 40s who have amassed a typical amount of wealth
for their age. That amounts to a true tax rate of 0.1 percent, or less than 10 cents for
every $100 in new wealth. In the coming months, ProPublica will make use of the
information we have obtained from the IRS to conduct in-depth research into the
ways in which the extremely wealthy evade federal auditors' scrutiny, exploit tax
loopholes, and avoid paying taxes.

One of the national government's most strictly confidential mysteries is charge data.
The public can only fully comprehend the country's tax system by seeing specifics,
which is why ProPublica has decided to disclose the individual tax information of
some of the wealthiest Americans. Take, for example, 2007, one of Bezos's years in
which he did not pay any federal income tax. Bezos, who did his taxes with his then-
wife, MacKenzie Scott, reported a pitiful $46 million in income that year, mostly
from dividends and interest payments on investments made outside the company.
Losses from side investments and various deductions, such as debt interest costs and
the ambiguous category of "other expenses," covered every penny he earned. It
becomes even more obvious when you examine his tax evasion from 2006 to 2018, a
time period for which ProPublica has complete data. Bezos' wealth increased by $127
billion, according to Forbes, but he claimed to have earned $6.5 billion overall. The
disclosure of IRS data comes at an important time. One of the significant issues
within recent memory is abundance imbalance.

After we examined the IRS in a series of articles, ProPublica received the tax data.
We received the raw data without any conditions or conclusions, and ProPublica does
not disclose how it obtained them. We have reasoned that the genuine concern is
outweighed by the public interest in knowing this data at this crucial moment. Our
analysis of tax data for the 25 richest Americans indicates how unfair the system has
become.

The concept of a regular income tax, let alone a wealth tax, is not mentioned in the
country's founding documents. A national income tax was enacted by Congress in
1861 in anticipation of the rising costs of the Civil War. Abundance dissimilarity was
serious by the late nineteenth and mid twentieth hundreds of years, and the political
environment was evolving. With the establishment of agencies to safeguard workers,
food, and other resources, the federal government began to expand.

It needs money, but the average American was suffering more than the wealthy. The
Supreme Court had rejected an 1894 law that would have established an income tax.
Macomber's income was solely derived from proceeds, according to the high court's
decision. The federal government considers nearly every dollar that workers earn to
be "income," and employers deduct taxes directly from their pay.