IRS Vows To Investigate Tax Leakers After Reporters Reveal Tax Avoidance From Wealthiest American

After ProPublica released the tax information of the wealthiest Americans showing that they paid little to no taxes for many years, the IRS decided that it was time to crack down...on the people who leaked the tax information, NOT the people who have managed to avoid paying taxes for years. This tells you everything that you need to know about the priorities of this arm of the government, and they would rather punish the people exposing the truth than actually go after the ones who are gaming the system. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses this.

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

A bombshell report came out from ProPublica this week, showing that some of the wealthiest Americans, in fact, not just some of, the wealthiest Americans in the United States, based on their tax data, which was obtained by ProPublica, that these individuals paid little to no taxes over the past 15 years. And this includes such notable billionaires as Jeff Bezos, who wants to go to outer space now and Warren Buffet. And of course, many others, the usual suspects, essentially, paid virtually nothing. Some years they did pay absolutely nothing in taxes to the IRS. So how did the IRS respond to that? Right? Because you know, rich people, avoiding taxes is nothing new. A lot of this information was already widely suspected. Now it's just been confirmed based on their tax documents. So what's the IRS going to do? Well, the IRS announced Tuesday evening that they are going to be investigating this because this behavior cannot stand, except they're not exactly investigating the tax avoiders out there.

No, they want to investigate who leaked the tax documents. How did ProPublica get their hands on these things? Why is this being published now? Why are people allowed to see how rigged the system is? That's what the IRS is investigating. And sure, releasing this tax information is not legal. Okay. You're not allowed to steal information from the IRS. ProPublica says they don't know who their source is, they were sent this information. They combed through it like good reporters do, good investigative journalists do this. And they published it because they said the risk or the rewards, excuse me, outweighed the risks because this was vital information that the public needed to understand. And that is the mark of a true investigative journalism team. And that is what we have over a ProPublica, honestly, one of the best investigative organizations out there and it's a nonprofit as well.

And the IRS wants answers as to how they got they're hands on this information, instead of looking at it and saying, holy crap, we're getting screwed out of tens of millions, possibly billions of dollars a year. Maybe we ought to do something about that. Maybe we ought to start auditing these individuals, which is something Elizabeth Warren wants to do by beefing up the IRS. But instead, they want to find the leakers. God forbid the American public under, understands, excuse me, how rigged the system is against them and in favor of the wealthy. And again, I'm not even implying and neither was ProPublica that these individuals did anything illegal. Most likely everything they did was totally legal and that's the problem. If we had all these multibillionaires out there, literally cheating on their taxes. Sure. That's a criminal enterprise. The problem isn't that it's illegal. The problem is that it is legal for them to do that. But we don't have the access to the same kind of loopholes and, you know, shenanigans that they do.

We don't have the ability to hide money off shore, so it doesn't get taxed. So we end up having to make up the difference somehow some way, whether it's through us having to pay more in taxes or whether it's through having to deal with underfunded schools and fire departments and other vital services here in the United States.