from David Ruccio
There’s been a lot of talk about oligarchs these past couple of months. Russian oligarchs, that is—the billionaires who have accumulated vast amounts of wealth, including large stakes in Russian industries, mines, and banks, as well as superyachts, private jets, investment accounts, and real estate in the West. We’ve even learned their names: Vladimir Potanin, Leonid Mikhelson, Alexey Mordashov, and so on.*
They’re a pretty easy target, given Russia’s savage war on Ukraine. But what about the other oligarchs out there, why aren’t we talking about them?
They also capture and keep massive amounts of the surplus produced by workers around the globe, and then accumulate even larger amounts of wealth, which they can live off of and utilize as they see fit. Why aren’t they on our radar?
Oh, they do pop up periodically. When Telsa founder Elon Musk engages in a hostile takeover of Twitter or workers manage to organize a union in one of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon warehouses or Michael Bloomberg decides to run for president. But there’s really no sustained attention paid to them or how they have managed to become billionaires. Which is why ProPublica’s recent investigation into the finances of the wealthiest Americans is so important.
The report is the latest in a series ProPublica started in June 2021 that examines the tax records of the top 0.001-percent wealthiest Americans—400 individuals all of whom earn more than $110 million a year.** In this installment, they show that U.S. oligarchs contrive to pay taxes at a lower rate than other Americans, even very wealthy ones just below them on the economic pyramid, for two reasons: first, because much of their income is derived from investments, like stocks, which is taxed at a lower rate; and second, they are able to use large charitable donations to obtain huge deductions. Most American workers don’t own much in the way of stocks, and their gifts to charity do little to lower their taxable incomes.
So, who are these oligarchs? Read more…
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