There's a lot of talk about making the Evil Rich pay their "fair share" these days. President Obama wants us to be very angry at the spectacle of billionaires escaping from confiscatory tax rates. For some reason, he never uses the very pertinent example of his good friend, top contributor, and Solyndra crony George Kaiser – who, judging by the amount of money we were all compelled to give him, is unquestionably The Most Important Man In America.
It's too bad Obama never rails against Kaiser, because the well-connected Oklahoma billionaire reported zero taxable income during five years of his rise to the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans. In another year, he claimed on $11,699 in taxable income, which works out to $5.62 per hour.
Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation reports that Kaiser has not exactly been bursting with enthusiasm to pay his "fair share" over the years:
In addition to Solyndra, the George Kaiser Family Foundation has investments worth hundreds of millions in energy firms, most of them in the oil and gas industry. TheWashington Post reported that, in 2005, Senate investigators focused on the tax implications of the foundation, whose assets at the end of 2009 had grown to nearly $4 billion. GKFF has averaged more than $194 million a year in income from those assets over the last five years and issued grants that averaged about $53 million a year--or just 1.7 percent of its net assets.
That wasn't the first time Kaiser caught the attention of government tax officials. In 1997, the Internal Revenue Service sent Kaiser and his companies tax bills for more than $72 million in back taxes, interest and penalties, covering individual and corporate returns filed from 1986 to 1992. Kaiser filed returns showing his personal income averaging negative $860,000 between 1986 and 1991; his holding company, GBK Corp., and its subsidiaries reported an aggregate loss from 1989 to 1992 of $507,000--some years it made money and paid taxes, others it claimed losses and paid none.
As Allison stresses, none of this was illegal. Kaiser was just doing precisely what Obama's entire re-election campaign is premised on portraying as a moral horror: taking advantage of perfectly legal deductions and loopholes to shelter his immense fortune from taxation.
The IRS challenged some of these techniques, and hit Kaiser with a bill for $24 million in back taxes. He fought them tooth and nail. The government eventually settled for $3.7 million, or 15 cents on the dollar. Does that sound consistent with Democrat Party rhetoric?
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