More than five years on, and there still have been no prosecutions of any major figures in the financial meltdown that almost destroyed our country. There’s been a lot of reasons floated as to why… societal disruption, the banks own the government, complexity of the crimes, and more. But perhaps the most galling
reason is that prosecutors were unable to find “any evidence of illegality”. The prosecutors may just be lazy, or worse, they may be right. It might very well be that nothing that happened in the meltdown was illegal. The process of making the illegal legal, of making foul into fair, has been a conscious effort over many years. It’s the subject of this month’s Book Spotlight…
“Perfectly Legal” by David Cay Johnston
One of the country’s top investigative reporters reveals how the richest people within the top 1 percent of the country has rigged the tax code and other laws in its favor.
Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston has been breaking pieces of this story on the front page of the New York Times for nine years, work for which one business school professor calls him “the de facto chief tax enforcement officer of the United States.” 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. And he has sound advice on what to do.
Since the mid-1970s, there has been a dramatic shift in who benefits from the American economy and bears the burden of taxes. CEOs, big investors and business owners can delay paying their taxes for years and sometimes escape them almost entirely, while wage earners have theirs taken from each paycheck. Discreet lobbying by the political donor class has made tax policies and enforcement a disaster. Because of obligations to these donors Washington has been unable, or unwilling, to fix these problems. The news media have largely ignored official favors to those who are supposed to pay the corporate income tax, the estate tax, and the gift tax. Millions of families expecting tax cuts are losing some or all of them to a stealth tax that was originally enacted only to apply to the tax-avoiding rich, but that now stings single mothers making as little as $28,000. But the cumulative results are remarkable: the 400 richest Americans pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than someone making $100,000. The 400 richest pay less and less of their income in taxes while the middle class pays more and more. And while the incomes of the very rich skyrocketed over three decades, the average income for the bottom 90 percent fell.
