A spicy investigation reveals how little taxes America's super-rich pay.
Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett come into focus, Elon Musk reacts irritated.
Washington - America's super-rich are getting richer and richer faster and faster - and paying less and less taxes.
According to a spicy disclosure report, US billionaires such as Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, Tesla boss Elon Musk and major investor Warren Buffett have paid little or no income tax in recent years.
The US research
portal ProPublica
has extensive tax data on the 25 richest US citizens.
Most of them would use various means of tax avoidance, explain the investing journalists.
According to this, Bezos, Buffett and Co. have a significantly lower income on paper than what the annual
Forbes
ranking
leads us to
believe.
US billionaires hardly pay any taxes: Warren Buffet advocates more taxes - and hardly pays any
ProPublica named
Warren Buffet
as a calculation example
. In recent years he had repeatedly advocated higher taxation of the rich. Between 2014 and 2018, his net worth grew by $ 24.3 billion, according to the disclosure report. In his tax returns, however, he only reported an income of $ 125 million - and paid $ 23.7 million in income tax on it, significantly less than the official US top tax rate of 37 percent.
According to
ProPublica,
Amazon founder Bezos earned
so little in 2011 that he was able to claim a $ 4,000 tax allowance for his children.
These tax practices have been known for years and are always a hot topic in America - so far it has only been possible to speculate about the scope and numbers.
Bezos, Musk and Buffett hardly pay any tax - this is how tax practice works
The research portal compared taxed income with the current
Forbes
figures of those affected. The crux of the matter: The vast majority of billionaires' wealth does not come from wage payments, it lies in company holdings and other assets. This is where the so-called realization principle comes into play: from a legal point of view, investments only become income when profits are realized through sales - in America as in Germany. "And if there is no sale, there is no tax," explains Professor Joachim Englisch, Director of the Institute for Tax Law at the University of Münster on
ZDF
.
Taxes on investment income, inheritances and other assets are usually comparatively low - at least when compared to income tax.
In addition, the super-rich have the opportunity to use their tax sum through losses from investments, loan interest or donations to reduce the tax amount.
Taxes of the super-rich revealed: Musk reacts irritated, others announce legal action
It
is not known
where
ProPublica got
the data from. But that they are highly confidential and otherwise only available to those concerned and the US tax authority IRS. The disclosure report is correspondingly angry. While Tesla boss Elon Musk
is said to have responded
to an e-mail request from
ProPublica
with a single question mark, a spokesman for Michael Bloomberg announced legal steps: "We plan to use all legal means available to us to find out which person or government agency leaked it. ”The US Treasury Department also announced an investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of confidential government information.