An analysis of IRS data has revealed that the wealthiest Americans are paying income
tax rates far lower than working class Americans and the usual suspects, well,
they're the ones paying the least. No surprise here. Great article done by ProPublica. I don't
know how they got the material. I mean, they, this is hard work to get this material, pick it up.
Yeah, absolutely and of course, you know, we've got all of these individuals. These
are the top 400 wealthiest people in the United States. Many of them paying tax rates in the low
teens or very high single digits. Run through some of the numbers.
Yeah. Bill Gates, he paid a tax rate of 18.4. Then Steve Ballmer, who now runs Microsoft,
14.1% Bloomberg, income of $2 billion, paid a tax rate of 4.1%. Bezos, 23%. So a little bit
higher for Bezos, I guess. Betsy DeVos, 10%.
Yeah. The billionaire DeVos family here, 10%. And then, you know, the Walton heir, Tom Walton,
heir to Walmart, he actually paid 23%. Yeah.
But those are, the 23% is relatively what a lower income American making 40,000 a year,
they're probably gonna pay about 23%. Add to that, that these are the same people
that have offshore banks. Yeah.
These, this is money we never see, you understand. They offshore the money, a corporation offshores
the money. And then we have to plead with them, oh, will you please bring your money back in from
the Isle of Man? And they say, well, if you'll negotiate with us and so they negotiate, the money
comes back in only when the feds agree, well, we're only gonna make you pay 5% on that money.
Yeah. Everybody else is paying
regular tax rates. Everybody else is doing exactly what they're supposed to do. This is a tragedy and
it's just, nobody seems to be willing to stop it. Well, it is, you know, and, and we discussed,
because it was revealed a couple years ago that there is this building down there,
I think in the Cayman islands, it's just this building and there's nothing but a
bunch of PO boxes in there and in there are the PO boxes of some of the largest corporations and
the wealthiest individuals because that's their address. That's, that's where they officially live
so they can avoid paying these taxes. It's crazy. You did, you did a story one time in the,
in the trial lawyer magazine and the number was staggering. It was 400 billion
dollars. Was, is that number correct? I, I think, well that was, you know,
at least what it was a couple years ago. I'm willing to bet at this point, it's a lot higher.
Yeah. Considering the excessive wealth we're
seeing that these individuals are hoarding now. And, and so that's in the islands and we have to
plea, please bring it back. Yeah.
And please pay some taxes, but we're gonna let you pay 5%. Everything's gonna be okay.
The meatpacking industry helped push for an executive order that allowed them to stay open,
but it resulted in hundreds of deaths of the workers. Remember we covered this.
Yep. When the,
as soon as this all started happening, we started covering this story because we were
getting people calling and, and they're saying, look, I think I have COVID and they're making it
sound like I simply have a flu. And they would go to work and they would then infect everybody
around them. And people died in these meatpacking, in this meatpacking the numbers were staggering
compared if you just took their numbers to the normal population, the numbers were staggering.
Well, there was a time in this country when more than 10% of the COVID cases were coming
from meatpacking plants. I mean, that's how bad these conditions were for these workers. And
so what happened here and this is a truly disgusting stories. All of these CEOs get
together. You have Smithfield, you have Tyson, you have the national chicken group, whatever
they're called. They're all having these phone calls with each other saying, what can we do?
Mm-hmm. We need to stress the importance of,
of meat and getting it out there. Oh, we remember that. Don't you?
Yeah. What happened there? Don't you
remember the meat shortage crisis? Yep.
Just like the baby formula shortage crisis. They hustled that. We caught 'em hustling it. We knew
they had enough supplies, but they were saying to the American public and saying to politicians,
if you don't let us break the law, if you don't let us kill a few people, we can't deliver this
product to you. And what they were doing is bringing people from over the border, right?
Yep. Immigrant workers, putting them in this
meatpacking business. If they died, they simply shipped them home. Chamber of Commerce loved that.
Yeah. And you just replace them with the next man up in line there. And you got this endless supply
of expendable labor as they like to look at it. Yeah.
And, and then of course it goes deeper. They're having these phone calls, they're saying, oh whoa
is me. What do we do? And then I think it was the Tyson CEO came up with the brilliant idea. Let's
write the executive order ourselves. Yeah.
And send it through Mark Meadows because they had this, you know, direct line to Trump's
chief of staff. He puts it in front of Trump. And of course it gets signed because, hey,
we're in a meat shortage. Everybody needs to eat. And that's how they framed it because the
meatpacking industry made them frame it that way. They were allowed to craft the talking points.
They drove the narrative and they put hundreds, if not thousands of people into early graves,
just so we could have bacon back on store shelves. Okay. Has that directive changed?
No. No. This administration has not changed
the directive. The Chamber of Commerce again, we always, I don't know why people miss this story.
The border is not about compassion. Trust me. It is not about compassion. It's about bringing in
workers in the United States. If they're on the job site and they lose an arm, no problem ship
'em back. If they're working in a meat factory and they die of COVID that could have been prevented.
No problem. Ship the body back. They don't have to pay workers compensation for that. There is
no lawsuit that they're gonna collect on there. They, it's, it's expendable labor as you put it.
And that's part of the program that's happening right at the border right now. And everybody's
looking at ,and the media is totally missing the fact that's being driven by the Chamber
of Commerce and Biden bought into that. Well, and Tyson foods has been one of the
leaders through the Chamber in making sure that nothing ever changes with immigration.
Yeah. You know, we had talked about
that probably over a decade ago, Tyson foods being involved in that, crafting the narrative, it was
with the Bush administration. They're meeting with him, making sure he doesn't close off the border
so they can keep that supply of labor coming. Interesting. Republicans have always been that
vacuum for, for Chamber of Commerce dollars. Big business, hell with consumers. That's always been
the mantra of the GOP. It's always been what we brand them. It's their brand. Hell with
consumers. We need big business and we'll do whatever you want. Now all of a sudden,
the Chamber of Commerce is giving the big money to the Democrats. And that started, that actually
started before Obama's time was up as president. Right. They, they kind of saw things shifting a
little bit. They knew that Obama was trying to crack down on the border and said, okay,
well we've gotta fix this. Mm-hmm.
Because typically Republicans use the border as a political rallying point.
Yeah. But they don't ever do anything
about it. And Trump started to try to build his wall. So they said, okay, well we've gotta get a
friendly administration that's just gonna let this come in. And so that's what happens here and it's
all so they can exploit these workers. Yeah.
It, it's not because, oh, we're gonna, you're gonna get a better life. No,
we're gonna pay you below minimum wage. We're gonna put you in the worst conditions possible.
And guess what? If you go and complain to the Feds about us putting you in an unsafe condition,
you get in trouble and you get shipped back and we just bring in somebody else.
You, you're going back to El Salvador, man. Yeah.