New IRS Analysis Shows Tax Evasion By Wealthy Americans Worse Than We Thought

A new analysis by IRS researchers shows that as much as 21% of the wealth held by the top 1% of households in the United States doesn't ever get reported to the IRS, leaving billions of dollars that should be paid in taxes hidden from the federal government. This isn't smart maneuvering, this is active tax evasion, and these households needs to be audited without hesitation. But Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains why this situation was allowed to grow out of control to the point where the wealthy feel safe with their tax avoidance.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

According to a new analysis out this week from researchers at the IRS, along with, from two universities revealed that 21% of the net worth of the top 1% of Americans goes unreported each year to the IRS, which means to put it another way. The richest people in this country are hiding on average 21% of their holdings from the IRS in order to avoid paying taxes.

This isn't tax avoidance, this isn't taking advantage of loopholes. This is, this is tax evasion. That's what this is. There is

No other way to slice it. This is tax evasion, borderline criminal tax evasion, by the way, and something needs to be done about this. So the question is, is why do these wealthy elite feel comfortable enough to where they're not reporting 21% of their income was see that's the other side of the story, a story that ProPublica released a, I guess maybe about a year or so ago. And it explains why Republic, uh, excuse me, wealthy elite are so comfortable with kind of pushing the bounds on what's legal and what's not with regards to their taxes. And it's very simple. Over the years, Republican budgets have cut and slash the IRS has budget to the point where they simply don't have the money to conduct the audit

It's of the wealthy. And they now conduct audits of

Low income Americans at a higher rate than they do wealthy Americans. And the reason is simple. When you take somebody who only has, you know, that one little W2 at the end of the year is pretty dang, easy to go through their taxes, right? You don't need to assemble a team of people working around the clock for a couple of weeks to perform the audit. You can give it to one person and they can knock it out in a day. And then you get to check off your little quota box saying, we did an audit here, here, here, here, here.

But

Suddenly when you want to audit somebody, who's got $500 million, eight different houses, two mega yachts, bunch of different shell companies where all their money's going in by God, you've just created a project for yourself. And the IRS has been starved of money intentionally

So

That they don't have the resources to go after those people. That's the second half of the story, all of this was intentional. Lawmakers knew when they were crafting these budgets to starve the IRS or Mont of money that this would be the end result. They wouldn't have the money to go after the wealthy elite through audits. That's why they did it self fulfilling. It came true and now wealthy people are saying, well, Hey, look, if we don't get audited, we don't ever get caught, right? This has to change. And this is part of Elizabeth. Warren's a wealth tax ideas that it would basically mandate more audits of the wealthy elite and ensure that all of them would get audited every couple of years to prevent crap like this. Um, if we tax these people, if they weren't hiding this money, that would give $175 billion annually every year, 175 billion to the federal government. That's how much they're stealing from us every single year. So it's time to audit. It's time to investigate, but first it may be time to throw some of these tax evaders in prison.

No.