Billionaires pay a lower tax rate than the rest of America's taxpayers, new study finds
Source: CBS News
August 27, 2025 / 7:58 AM EDT
The rich are different from other people — and that also applies to the share of their income they pay in taxes, according to a new study from University of California, Berkeley, economists.
The individuals who make up the Forbes 400 list, topped by Tesla CEO Elon Musk with a fortune of $244 billion, paid an average effective tax rate of 24% from 2018 to 2020, compared with a 30% rate for all other U.S. taxpayers, the researchers said in a new paper published in the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The research comes as President Trump's "big, beautiful bill," signed into law on July 4, delivers its largest benefits to the highest-earning Americans through a mix of new and extended tax breaks. Those include raising the estate-tax exemption to $15 million per person, up from about $14 million. The changes build on an earlier tax cut — the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Mr. Trump's signature first-term legislation. That 2017 law reduced the effective tax rate for the richest Americans from 30% to 24%, the researchers found.
The new findings — from Berkeley economists and noted inequality experts Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman — calculates the tax rate by tallying all income taxes, as well as corporate taxes that are paid by the companies owned by the richest Americans. In other words, it assigns a share of Amazon's corporate taxes to that of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos when calculating his total tax burden. "The economic income of the wealthiest are essentially the profits of the businesses they own," Saez told CBS MoneyWatch in an email. "Jeff Bezos owns about 10% of Amazon, and hence his true economic income is 10% of Amazon's profits."
Read more: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/income-taxes-billionaire-tax-rate-irs/
Link to National Bureau of Economic Research PUBLICATION (PDF) - https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34170/w34170.pdf
All together now DU - "NO DUH!!!11!!!", "NO SHIT SHERLOCK!111!!!!", "UM, YA THINK???!!11!1!"
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One of the few times I’ve talked about politics with my rightwing brother the subject of Social Security solvency came up. I said that it should be a non-issue, since all that needed to be done was remove the cap on contributions.
You would have thought I’d suggested sacrificing one of his children. I said I didn’t think he had maxed out his payments, but he claimed he did*. I then asked If he made that much money why should he be upset at paying a few hundred more a year? He got beat red and started foaming at the mouth. My mother changed the subject. 
*I like to say that my brother is the first person in the family to make enough money to justify (economically, at least) being a Republican.
... it's how they are able to shield their true income and true wealth so that they never have to TELL Uncle Sam how wealthy they really are. There are so many schemes for hiding the one-per-centers' wealth in America (and offshore too) that it's all a huge game to them.
Meanwhile the rest of us (or most of us anyway) live paycheck to paycheck and the tax was already taken out before we ever received the money.
LOL at these clowns and their desperation to not look like the shits that they are?
But they work so hard..I would lay down my life for our billionaire class 🥹
Fuck those creeps
I find no new news here. The real question is why do the people let them get the Hell away with that inequality. Maybe we need to go back and "study" the tale of Robin Hood economics and reprint it's findings. How's about Aesop's fables? Look it, all we ever needed was what we learned in kindergarten, right? Somehow, somewhere, along life's highway, we've ended up with
the "Haves" and the "Have Nots." It just doesn't work on the teeter-totter of life. Too damn much dishonesty, inequality, and morality have brought our Lincoln logs tumbling to the ground. It's allot to attend to. But I sincerely hope we can start with at least honesty and equality as we rebuild this broken society. 
