Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever! Rolilng Stone Magizine

[PAULYPOKER]

CBO study: US tax breaks benefit the wealthy



The U.S. tax code is rigged in ways that mainly benefits the wealthiest Americans, according to a new study by the Congressional Budget Office.

Tax breaks such as deductions and credits, which are supposed to benefit lower income Americans, mainly benefit the top earners in the United States, the report said.

More than half the benefits of 10 major tax breaks go to the one-fifth of U.S. households at the top of the income bracket. The top 1 percent of earners reaps 17 percent of benefits stemming from these tax breaks.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, a Democrat and ranking member on the House Budget Committee who requested the study said in a statement, “[The report] shows that tax breaks are skewed in favor of the top 1 percent of Americans at the expense of other priorities.”

“It’s clear that we can limit unproductive and excessive tax preferences for the very wealthy as part of a plan to reduce the long-term deficit and promote long-term economic growth,” he said.

The tax deductions will cost the U.S. Treasury $900 billion this year in revenue and would cost $12 trillion over the next decade, the CBO found.

Last year, a report by the Congressional Research Service concluded that the tax cuts that were first enacted under the presidency of George W. Bush have contributed to a widening of the wealth gap in the United States.

U.S. CEOs of the biggest firms made 354 times what the average rank-and-file worker earned in 2012, by far the widest pay gap in the world, according to the AFL-CIO.

Inequality in wealth distribution in the United States has been evident in various surveys conducted over the past three decades.

According to a recent report by the Pew Research Center, the richest 7% of American families saw their average wealth soar 28% from 2009 to 2011, while the remaining households lost 4% of their net worth over the same period.

A 2011 study by the CBO found that the top earning 1% of households gained about 275% between 1979 and 2007.

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[PAULYPOKER]

US banks seen as aid in fraud against old consumers http://www.presstv.ir/usdetail/308348.html



Court records suggest that banks across the United States help facilitate billions of dollars of fraud each year against older consumers by giving predatory lenders and businesspeople access to the country’s financial system.

Federal authorities say such fraudulent activities occur with alarming frequency in the country.

In one case, the Zions Bank of Salt Lake City in the state of Utah is serving as a gateway between dubious Internet merchants and their marks - and makes profits in the process, according to newly unsealed court documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The Times reviewed hundreds of filings in connection with civil lawsuits brought by federal authorities and a consumer law firm against Zions and another regional bank, First Bank of Delaware.

Last November, First Delaware reached a $15 million settlement with the Justice Department after the bank was accused of allowing merchants to illegally debit accounts more than two million times and siphon more than $100 million, the newspaper said.

All consumers can be targeted by corrupt marketers but older people, due to their financial worries, age, and loneliness, are more vulnerable to mass market fraud and deceptive pitches that arrive by telephone, mail and the Internet, according to the Times review of court records.

Between 2007 and 2009, Zions let roughly $39 million be withdrawn from hundreds of thousands of accounts. During the period, tens of thousands of Americans, many of them over age 65, lodged complaints with state attorneys general, banking regulators and the F.T.C., requesting refunds for bank charges that they say were unauthorized, according to court records.

According to the Times, officials at the FTC, the Justice Department, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation say this is just the tip of the iceberg. Officials say the First Delaware case is a warning to the banking industry in America.

The Justice Department is considering criminal actions against a number of banks for allowing dubious merchants conduct businesses that they know make unauthorized withdrawals from customer accounts.

ARA/HJ
-PressTV

[PAULYPOKER]

Income inequality greatly exacerbated by US tax system: Study

Income for the country's top 1 percent has soared by 275 percent over the past 30 years, while growth for the rest of Americans has stagnated. A new study finds that policymakers' decisions to make the tax code less progressive played a large role in widening that gulf.

About 30 percent of the expansion of the after-tax income gulf between the rich and not-so-rich between 1979 and 2007 was due to tax and budget policies becoming less redistributive, according to a recent paper from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

In addition, the boost in income for the top 1 percent and the top 0.01 percent of households is correlated with tax cuts, the study found.

In short: Policymakers' decisions to slash taxes -- especially on the rich -- contributed to income inequality.

Andrew Fieldhouse, the paper’s author and a budget policy analyst at EPI, said that while market forces are largely to blame for the growth in income inequality, the government bears responsibility for making it worse.

“This is just another piece of evidence, at the broadest level, that Washington’s model for tax reform is completely divorced from economic research,” Fieldhouse told The Huffington Post. “Federal budget policy not only failed to push back these market forces, but exacerbated income inequality.”

While EPI’s analysis is one of many to find that keeping taxes low -- especially for the rich -- widens the gap between the haves and have-nots, that hasn’t stopped policymakers from fighting tax increases.

The budget President Barack Obama proposed earlier this year boosted taxes on the wealthy -- but still by not has high of a margin as he originally promised -- and it was met with opposition by leading Republicans.

Recent research has found that slashing taxes on the rich doesn’t lead to the boost in economic growth promised by many proponents.

And while some have argued that raising taxes on the rich will disincentive them to work hard, another EPI study that rich households don't respond to increases by being less productive -- rather, the study found, they simply shift their income to categories that are taxed at lower rates (like investment income).

Indeed, the jump in income inequality over the past few decades is correlated with a simultaneous boost in investment income, which is largely concentrated in the hands of the rich and is taxed at lower rates than the income earned from good old-fashioned work, according to EPI.

The preferential tax treatment of investment income has increased over the past few decades, a factor which “almost certainly played a role” in widening the income gulf, the EPI paper found.

More income inequality has consequences for Americans at all places along the income ladder. The large gap between the rich and the poor is slowing the nation's recovery from the recession, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote in a New York Times op-ed earlier this year.

And reducing income inequality could prolong periods of economic growth, a 2011 study from the International Monetary Fund found. The Huffington Post

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[PAULYPOKER]

Study: US companies lobbying to save corporate tax loopholes


Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, testifies during a Senate Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Investigations titled
'Offshore Profit Shifting.

Corporate America worked hard to build massive loopholes into the tax code for itself, and by golly it is working just as hard to keep them.

U.S. companies, along with their lobbyists and trade groups, are treating Washington, D.C., like a big, swampy strip club, showering it with cash in an effort to fight tax reform laws that might put hundreds of billions of dollars back into government coffers.

The seamy details of this lobbying effort are found in a new study by the reform advocacy group Public Citizen. It is arguably one of the least-surprising studies in the history of studies, right up there with research confirming that popes tend to wear large hats. But it makes for depressing, eye-opening reading nonetheless.

For one thing, there is the chart that leads off the study, showing how corporate profits have soared to all-time highs as a percentage of U.S. gross domestic product, while corporate taxes are near record lows.

This state of affairs exists largely because the biggest U.S. corporations have for years lobbied Congress for loopholes that allow them to keep much of their profits out of the clutches of the IRS, including an estimated $1.7 trillion in cash held offshore.

Apple Inc. has been public face of this issue lately, with its CEO Tim Cook hauled before a Senate panel to explain why his company is keeping more than $100 billion offshore. Apple spent $2 million on lobbying last year and could double that this year, Reuters reported recently. The company has managed to avoid paying taxes, in perfectly legal ways, on $74 billion in profits since 2009, according to a recent Senate investigation.

As you may have heard, the U.S. government has found itself in a bit of a fiscal pickle recently and could use some of this cash. That has led some lawmakers to try to find ways to close some of these loopholes.

Two bills, the Cut Unjustified Tax Loopholes Act and the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act, have aimed to do just that. A third bill, the Wall Street Trading and Speculators Tax Act, would slap taxes on some financial transactions -- not a loophole-closing bill, exactly, but one that would help address the fact that the U.S. financial sector currently makes up 30 percent of total corporate profits, but only coughs up 18 percent of total corporate tax revenues to the government.

Some reform-minded groups are lobbying in favor of these bills, notes Public Citizen. But they are being drowned out by the lobbying in the other direction.

Of the 383 lobbyists working over lawmakers on these bills, 331 were from companies or corporate trade groups opposed to them, by Public Citizen's count.

Meanwhile, the companies and groups lobbying on these bills are represented by 46 different political action committees that donated money to lawmakers in the 2012 election cycle, according to Public Citizen. Of that group, 40 PACs represented corporate America and spent $20 million on their favorite candidates.

The top three money-donating PACs in this group were the National Association of Realtors, the Credit Union National Association and the American Bankers Association. Individual corporate PACs included AT&T, General Electric, Pfizer and Microsoft.

It's a free country, of course, and companies, like people, have the right to free speech in the form of campaign donations. But all that free speech is expensive, and these companies have a lot more money to make their case than the rest of us taxpayers -- who will almost certainly keep ending up paying the cost. The Huffington Post

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[TheGoldenGoose]

George Carlin telling it like it is...