America’s 25 richest people pay …

A report from a journalistic organization in the United States found that the 25 richest people in the country pay less tax than middle-class workers. Among the list of millionaires is the creator of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, the creator of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon musk and the entrepreneur and the investor Warren Buffett.

According to a report by the organization ProPublica, the 25 richest Americans pay on average 15.8% less tax on gross income than average employees nationwide, once taxes for Social Security and Medicare health insurance are included.

The investigation revealed that Bezos did not pay income tax in 2007 even when his company’s stock price doubled and he increased his fortune by about $ 3.8 trillion; What Musk didn’t pay him in 2018 either. and that the financier George Soros did not have to pay tribute three years in a row.

A spokesperson for Soros, who has publicly supported raising taxes on the rich, told ProPublica that the billionaire lost money on his investments from 2016 to 2018 and that is why he did not paid federal taxes for those years.

For his part, Musk only responded with a question mark when asked by ProPublica and, so far, has not made any statement about it.

The information came to ProPublica through an anonymous source who sent Internal Revenue Service data on the nation’s wealthiest, such as Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg.

The journalistic organization compared this data with data from other sources and indicated that “in all the cases that we were able to verify (with the tax returns of more than 50 people), the details provided to ProPublica coincided with information from other sources “.

In the USA, the payment of federal tax is progressive, that is, people have to pay more as their income increases. But ProPublica concluded that in fact, people who earn between $ 2 million and $ 5 million per year paid an average of 27.5% in taxes, the highest rate of all taxpayer groups.

According to the ProPublica report, at the end of 2018, the 25 richest people in the United States had $ 1.1 trillion, when it takes at least 14.3 million people with an average salary to raise the same amount. silver. However, that year the 25 together paid $ 1.9 billion in taxes and the workers $ 143 million.

The report comes at a key point in the debate on US tax policy. President Joe Biden proposed to raise taxes on millionaires and increase the maximum rate from 37 to 39 percent for people earning $ 400,000 a year or more in taxable income. This would affect less than 2 percent of American households.