The wealthy pay more than their fair share.

• “In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.”

• “Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.”

• “The results are stark. According to Forbes, those 25 people saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes in those five years, the IRS data shows. That’s a staggering sum, but it amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4%.”

• “No one among the 25 wealthiest avoided as much tax as Buffett, the grandfatherly centibillionaire. That’s perhaps surprising, given his public stance as an advocate of higher taxes for the rich. According to Forbes, his riches rose $24.3 billion between 2014 and 2018. Over those years, the data shows, Buffett reported paying $23.7 million in taxes. That works out to a true tax rate of 0.1%, or less than 10 cents for every $100 he added to his wealth.”

• “Consider Bezos’ 2007, one of the years he paid zero in federal income taxes. Amazon’s stock more than doubled. Bezos’ fortune leapt $3.8 billion, according to Forbes, whose wealth estimates are widely cited. How did a person enjoying that sort of wealth explosion end up paying no income tax?”

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/propublica/

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/forbes/

I don’t know about you, but I sure as shit ain’t getting a near 0% tax rate.

So yes, it’s fiscally responsible to give them a tax break.

• “Inequality has remained persistently high for decades, and a new report shows just how stark the divide is between the richest and poorest people on the planet.”

• “The 2022 World Inequality Report, a huge undertaking coordinated by economic and inequality experts Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, was the product of four years of research and produced an unprecedented data set on just how wealth is distributed.”

• ““The world is marked by a very high level of income inequality and an extreme level of wealth inequality,” the authors wrote.”

• “The data serves as a complete rebuke of the trickle-down economic theory, which posits that cutting taxes on the rich will “trickle down” to those below, with the cuts eventually benefiting everyone. In America, trickle-down was exemplified by President Ronald Reagan’s tax slashes. It’s a theory that persists today, even though most research has shown that 50 years of tax cuts benefits the wealthy and worsens inequality.”"

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-bad-is-inequality-trickle-down-economics-thomas-piketty-economists-2021-12

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/business-insider/

• “We find that major tax cuts for the rich push up income inequality, as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The size of the effect is substantial: on average, each major tax cut results in a rise of 0.8 percentage points in top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect holds in both the short and medium term. Turning our attention to economic performance, we find no significant effects of major tax cuts for the rich. More specifically, the trajectories of real GDP per capita and the unemployment rate are unaffected by significant reductions in taxes on the rich in both the short and medium term. Our results have important implications for current debates around the economic consequences of taxing the rich, as they provide causal evidence that supports the growing pool of evidence from correlational studies that cutting taxes on the rich increases top income shares, but has little effect on economic performance (Lee and Gordon, 2005; Piketty et al., 2014; Roine et al., 2009). They also align with the causal findings in Rubulino and Waldenstrom (2020), but provide stronger and more generalizable conclusions, as our approach allows us to move beyond looking at tax changes in only handful of selected countries. There are several potentially fruitful avenues for future research that come out of our analysis. While our choice of dependent variable (including both capital and labour income) makes it less likely the results are being driven by tax shifting or avoidance, we do not specifically test the mechanisms at work. Follow up research could therefore assess whether the macroeconomic effects we find are being driven by the mechanism outlined in Piketty et al. (2014), which is that lower taxes on top incomes induce the rich to bargain more aggressively to increase their own rewards, to the direct detriment of those lower down the income distribution. The analysis could also be extended outside of the OECD to see if the findings hold in countries with lower fiscal capacity. Lastly, from a policy perspective, it would also be important to understand more about the extent to which individuals’ attitudes to taxing the rich are influenced (or not) by the provision of new information about its economic consequence”

https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/107919/1/Hope_economic_consequences_of_major_tax_cuts_published.pdf

TL;DR: Tax cuts for the rich are a failure, they hurt the average tax payer by increasing wealth disparity.

🍿