Economic apartheid: Explosive report shows how rich Americans have their own “private tax system tha

[applegrove]

Economic apartheid: Explosive report shows how rich Americans have their own “private tax system that saves them billions”
by Ben Norton at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2015/12/31/economic_apartheid_explosive_report_shows_how_rich_americans_have_their_own_private_tax_system_that_saves_them_billions/

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A system of governance in which different segments of society live under distinct sets of laws is an apartheid regime. An explosive report by The New York Times shows how the U.S. is ruled by a system of economic apartheid — one in which the rich have their own set of laws, while everyone else toils under a separate, harsher legal system.



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American economic apartheid was made perhaps most evident when a rich teen got off of manslaughter charges by claiming he suffered from “affluenza,” or having too much money. Yet the problem runs much deeper, and pervades the political system itself, the new report shows.


Wealthy Americans have access to institutions and opportunities that are rarely available to the working class, such as tax courts and even private negotiations with the IRS. They see it as an investment. A political scientist told the Times the rich “pay millions of dollars for these services, and save in the tens or hundreds of millions in taxes.”

This “sophisticated and astonishingly effective apparatus for shielding their fortunes,” as the Times calls it, is referred to as the “income defense industry,” and consists of “a high-priced phalanx of lawyers, estate planners, lobbyists, and anti-tax activists who exploit and defend a dizzying array of tax maneuvers, virtually none of them available to taxpayers of more modest means.”




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