"By any rational historical or global standard, we don't have an "overtaxation" problem in the United States.
Our problem lies elsewhere. We have an under-taxed rich. Under current U.S. tax law, the wealthy in the United States don't have to pay much in taxes. Even worse, they don't even pay what they owe.
Another reminder of this systematic shortchanging of Uncle Sam emerged from the independent panel Congress created in 1998 to monitor the IRS. According to the latest available figures, this IRS Oversight Board notes in its new annual report, $290 billion a year in taxes due is going uncollected.
Not all of that, to be sure, reflects tax evasion by the rich. But tax evasion by the wealthy represents an oversized share of that gap. In 2008, one study broke the IRS "tax gap" data down by income level and found that Americans making between $500,000 and $1 million a year were underreporting their incomes at triple the "misreport" rate of taxpayers making between $30,000 and $50,000.
What's the IRS doing about all this? The Oversight Board sees some promise in recent IRS action. The agency, notes the board, "initiated a major effort in 2009 to
identify taxpayers who were hiding money in offshore tax jurisdictions."
As part of that effort, the UBS Swiss banking giant agreed to turn over the names of 4,450 U.S. taxpayers who had been stashing dollars in secret Alpine accounts. And 14,700 U.S. taxpayers agreed to reveal details on their own offshore accounts after the IRS set up a voluntary disclosure program."\
rest of article at http://peoplesworld.org/over-taxed-not-by-the-numbers/
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