$2 Trillion, or 70%, Pandemic Wealth Gain of Nation’s 740 Richest
Americans For Tax Fairness: “American billionaires saw their collective net worth climb by $2 trillion, or 70%, during the first two years of the pandemic to a staggering $5 trillion, according to Forbes data analyzed by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF). [See table below and all data here] But none of that wealth growth—the main source of billionaire income—may ever be taxed. The total number of U.S. billionaires increased from 614 to 741 over the two-year period from March 18, 2020, to April 5, 2022. Loopholes often allow billionaires to pay little or no federal income tax. An expose last year by ProPublica based on IRS data revealed that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other top billionaires paid zero federal income taxin several recent years. It determined that the top 25 billionaires paid just a 3.4% tax rate between 2014 to 2018 when the growth in their wealth is counted as income. White House economists have determined the nation’s 400 richest billionaires paid a tax rate of only 8.2% over a recent nine-year span when the increased value of their corporate stock was counted as income. The average federal income-tax rate for all taxpayers was 13.3% in 2019. Billionaires and other very wealthy people overwhelmingly generate income not from a job or small business, but from the growth in the value of their investments. But that form of income is never taxed unless the investments are sold. Yet the very wealthy do not need to sell their assets to turn the increasing value of their wealth into cash income; instead, they use their swelling fortunes to secure special low-interest loans allowing them to live lavishly without paying income taxes. Moreover, a lifetime of such income growth from assets can be passed onto the next generation tax-free…”
University of Colorado Law Review > Printed> Volume 93 > Issue 1 > Robophobia by Andrew Keane Woods
“Robots—machines, algorithms, artificial intelligence—play an increasingly important role in society, often supplementing or even replacing human judgment. Scholars have rightly become concerned with the fairness, accuracy, and humanity of these systems. Indeed, anxiety about machine bias is at a fever pitch. While these concerns are important, they nearly all run in one direction: we worry about robot bias against humans; we rarely worry about human bias against robots.
Why We Can’t House the Homeless
The scum on the Mother Earth that awful South African billionaire is getting more oxygen … bizarre as some take his observations seriously
Elon Musk Should Have Been Stopped Long Before He Came for Twitter Francine McKenna, Time. From April, still germane. Good to see McKenna in TIme!
OK, try “squillonaire”:
Use of the word “billionaire” as a pejorative is morally wrong & dumb 😛
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 26, 2022