Matt O'Brien: Inequality is worse than we know. The super...

Matt O'Brien: Inequality is worse than we know. The super-rich really do avoid a lot of taxes: "On the legal end of the spectrum... companies shift their profits to show up in low-tax jurisdictions.... According to Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman and his co-researchers... as much as 40 percent of all multinational profits and 50 percent of U.S. ones...

...U.S. companies report more profits in Ireland, the top tax-avoidance destination in the world, than they do in China, Japan, Germany, France and Mexico combined.... Because a lot of that money is often invested in things such as U.S. Treasury and corporate bonds despite being listed in other countries for accounting purposes ��� they still have to pay taxes on it here, so we can keep track of how much they have.

That isn���t the case, though, when it comes to the... outright evading of taxes... by its very nature... not the kind of thing we can begin to quantify. People, after all, don���t exactly fill out forms telling us how much of their taxes they���re not paying. But it turns out that we don���t need them to. That���s because the Bank for International Settlements has begun publishing statistics on the banking relationships between different countries that allow us to stitch together a picture of how much wealth is being held offshore. And it���s a lot. Zucman and his team estimate that around 10 percent of global GDP is being held inside all the different tax havens. It���s not as bad for the United States as it is for a lot of other countries���about half of Russia���s wealth, for example, has been moved out of the country���but it���s enough to increase the top 0.01 percent���s share of household wealth from about 7 percent to almost 8 percent. That���s over $1 trillion hiding overseas.

But rather than do anything about this, President Trump���s administration and the Republican Party as a whole have continued to starve the IRS of the money it would need to pursue these kinds of investigations...

#shouldread
#inequality
#equitablegrowth