IRS Data Reveals Wealthiest Tax Dodgers & Meat Industry Pushed Law That Caused Worker Deaths

An analysis of IRS data has revealed that the wealthiest Americans are paying income tax rates far lower than working class Americans – and the usual suspects are the ones paying the least. Also, the meat packing industry helped push for an executive order that allowed them to stay open, but resulted in the deaths of hundreds of workers. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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

An analysis of IRS data has revealed that the wealthiest Americans are paying income tax rates far lower than working class Americans and the usual suspects, well, they're the ones paying the least. No surprise here. Great article done by ProPublica. I don't know how they got the material. I mean, they, this is hard work to get this material, pick it up.

Yeah, absolutely and of course, you know, we've got all of these individuals. These are the top 400 wealthiest people in the United States. Many of them paying tax rates in the low teens or very high single digits.

Run through some of the numbers.

Yeah. Bill Gates, he paid a tax rate of 18.4. Then Steve Ballmer, who now runs Microsoft, 14.1% Bloomberg, income of $2 billion, paid a tax rate of 4.1%. Bezos, 23%. So a little bit higher for Bezos, I guess.

Betsy DeVos, 10%.

Yeah. The billionaire DeVos family here, 10%. And then, you know, the Walton heir, Tom Walton, heir to Walmart, he actually paid 23%.

Yeah.

But those are, the 23% is relatively what a lower income American making 40,000 a year, they're probably gonna pay about 23%.

Add to that, that these are the same people that have offshore banks.

Yeah.

These, this is money we never see, you understand. They offshore the money, a corporation offshores the money. And then we have to plead with them, oh, will you please bring your money back in from the Isle of Man? And they say, well, if you'll negotiate with us and so they negotiate, the money comes back in only when the feds agree, well, we're only gonna make you pay 5% on that money.

Yeah.

Everybody else is paying regular tax rates. Everybody else is doing exactly what they're supposed to do. This is a tragedy and it's just, nobody seems to be willing to stop it.

Well, it is, you know, and, and we discussed, because it was revealed a couple years ago that there is this building down there, I think in the Cayman islands, it's just this building and there's nothing but a bunch of PO boxes in there and in there are the PO boxes of some of the largest corporations and the wealthiest individuals because that's their address. That's, that's where they officially live so they can avoid paying these taxes. It's crazy.

You did, you did a story one time in the, in the trial lawyer magazine and the number was staggering. It was 400 billion dollars. Was, is that number correct?

I, I think, well that was, you know, at least what it was a couple years ago. I'm willing to bet at this point, it's a lot higher.

Yeah.

Considering the excessive wealth we're seeing that these individuals are hoarding now.

And, and so that's in the islands and we have to plea, please bring it back.

Yeah.

And please pay some taxes, but we're gonna let you pay 5%. Everything's gonna be okay.

The meatpacking industry helped push for an executive order that allowed them to stay open, but it resulted in hundreds of deaths of the workers. Remember we covered this.

Yep.

When the, as soon as this all started happening, we started covering this story because we were getting people calling and, and they're saying, look, I think I have COVID and they're making it sound like I simply have a flu. And they would go to work and they would then infect everybody around them. And people died in these meatpacking, in this meatpacking the numbers were staggering compared if you just took their numbers to the normal population, the numbers were staggering.

Well, there was a time in this country when more than 10% of the COVID cases were coming from meatpacking plants. I mean, that's how bad these conditions were for these workers. And so what happened here and this is a truly disgusting stories. All of these CEOs get.