Perfectly Legal : The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--And Cheat Everybody Else

by Johnston, David Cay (Author)

• ISBN13: 9781591840695
• ISBN10: 1591840694
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-01-30
• Publisher: Portfolio Trade

Summary

Now updated with a new prologue! Since the mid-1970s, there has been a dramatic shift in America's socioeconomic system, one that has gone virtually unnoticed by the general public. Tax policies and their enforcement have become a disaster, and thanks to discreet lobbying by a segment of the top 1 percent, Washington is reluctant or unable to fix them. The corporate income tax, the estate tax, and the gift tax have been largely ignored by the media. But the cumulative results are remarkable: today someone who earns a yearly salary of $60,000 pays a larger percentage of his income in taxes than the four hundred richest Americans. Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston exposes exactly how the middle class is being squeezed to create a widening wealth gap that threatens the stability of the country. By relating the compelling tales of real people across all areas of society, he reveals the truth behind: "middle class" tax cuts and exactly whom they benefit how workers are being cheated out of their retirement plans while disgraced CEOs walk away with millions how some corporations avoid paying any federal income tax how a law meant to prevent cheating by the top 2 percent of Americans no longer affects most of them, but has morphed into a stealth tax on single mothers making just $28,000 why the working poor are seven times more likely to be audited by the IRS than everyone else how the IRS became so weak that even when it was handed complete banking records detailing massive cheating by 1,600 people, it prosecuted only 4 percent of them Johnston has been breaking pieces of this story on the front page of The New York Times for seven years. With Perfectly Legal, he puts the whole shocking narrative together in a way that will stir up media attention and make readers angry about the state of our country.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Prologue	1	(6)
Chapter 1 Taxes-They're Not for Everyone	7	(15)
Chapter 2 A Nickel an Hour More	22	(10)
Chapter 3 The Rich Get Fabulously Richer	32	(15)
Chapter 4 Big Payday	47	(14)
Chapter 5 Plane Perks	61	(12)
Chapter 6 When the Old Man Is Dead and Buried	73	(21)
Chapter 7 The Stealth Tax	94	(25)
Chapter 8 How Social Security Taxes Subsidize the Rich	119	(12)
Chapter 9 Preying on the Working Poor	131	(16)
Chapter 10 Handcuffing the Tax Police	147	(12)
Chapter 11 Mr. Rossotti's Customers	159	(12)
Chapter 12 For Want of a Keystroke	171	(17)
Chapter 13 Mr. Kellogg's Favorite Loophole	188	(8)
Chapter 14 Mass Market Tax Evasion	196	(13)
Chapter 15 Getting off the Hook	209	(10)
Chapter 16 Profiting off Taxes	219	(12)
Chapter 17 Profits Trump Patriotism	231	(22)
Chapter 18 Letters to Switzerland	253	(11)
Chapter 19 Gimme Shelter	264	(12)
Chapter 20 Only the Rich Deserve a Comfortable Retirement	276	(18)
Chapter 21 Is Reform Possible?	294	(13)
Conclusions	307	(14)
Notes	321	(10)
Index	331