Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: President Biden’s economic advisers are pulling together a sweeping $3 trillion package to boost the economy, reduce carbon emissions and narrow economic inequality, beginning with a giant infrastructure plan that may be financed in part through tax increases on corporations and the rich. After months of internal debate, Mr. Biden’s advisers are expected to present the spending proposal to the president and congressional leaders this week, as well as begin outreach to industry and labor…

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The New York Times reports: At Adewale Adeyemo’s confirmation hearing last month, Senator Elizabeth Warren pressed the deputy Treasury secretary nominee to commit to using the department’s regulatory powers to scrutinize the private equity industry, which she said posed a risk to low-income communities when buyout firms strip companies of assets, load them with debt and fire workers. Ms. Warren, a progressive Democrat from Massachusetts, has been a mentor to Mr. Adeyemo, who served as her chief of staff when…

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Michael Heller and James Salzman write: Over the past pandemic year, American billionaires have grown $1.3 trillion richer, the beneficiaries of a soaring stock market. Income inequality has widened. One response is imposing new taxes on wealth, such as those just introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), but that approach faces significant political hurdles. There’s another way to tackle the problem. Instead of focusing only on taxing wealth accumulation, we can address the hidden flip side — wealth transmission. America’s…

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Bloomberg reports: More than 20% of the wealthiest Americans’ income isn’t being reported to the Internal Revenue Service, according to a new study that calculates U.S. tax evasion is far higher than previously estimated. Random audits of the rich can detect some tax evasion, but the study’s authors found that the IRS easily misses income hidden in sophisticated ways, including in private businesses and offshore structures. Collecting all unpaid income tax from the top 1% would boost revenue to the…

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Politico reports: The average tax rate on U.S. corporations fell by more than half, to 7.8 percent, in the wake of Republicans’ 2017 tax overhaul, according to a new government analysis. In a report sure to inflame the debate over corporate taxation, the official Joint Committee on Taxation also said businesses continue to make extensive use of offshore tax havens such as the Cayman Islands and Bermuda to reduce their tax bills. At the same time, the nonpartisan office said,…

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Derek Robertson writes: For a political party whose membership skews older, it might be surprising that the spirit that most animates Republican politics today is best described with a phrase from the world of video games: “Owning the libs.” Gamers borrowed the term from the nascent world of 1990s computer hacking, using it to describe their conquered opponents: “owned.” To “own the libs” does not require victory so much as a commitment to infuriating, flummoxing or otherwise distressing liberals with…

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In an editorial, the New York Times says: When the federal government started withholding income taxes from workers’ paychecks during World War II, the innovation was presented as a matter of fairness, a way to ensure that everyone paid. Irving Berlin wrote a song for the Treasury Department: “You see those bombers in the sky? Rockefeller helped to build them. So did I.” The withholding system remains the cornerstone of income taxation, effectively preventing Americans from lying about wage income….

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Jack Herrera writes: Each night as Janiana tries to sleep, she wonders about what’s going to happen to her baby grandnephew. The woman, a 26-year-old from Honduras, lives in a tent together with her 20-year-old niece, the baby’s mother, in a tent village of hundreds of asylum seekers like them that formed right next to the pedestrian bridge that leads from Mexico into California. They’re among the tens of thousands of people crowded in dire conditions across the length of…

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