President Biden has long demanded that the wealthy "pay their 'fair share' of taxes," which raises the question: What is "fair," and who decides what is "fair"? 

Is it honest brokers?  Or ideologically driven fascists such as the Soviets, who caused the great Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933, when the then-ruling communists decided it was "fair" to take everything the people they branded "kulaks" had? 

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? as the Roman Juvenal noted.

In Biden's Sept. 16 speech about the economy, fair taxes, and the China virus, Biden extended his anti-rich rhetoric into dangerous waters.  He accused the top 1% and wealthy corporations, not merely of legal tax evasion by intelligent uses of the tax code, but of downright criminal tax evasion.

I quote from the rev.com transcript of his speech:

All I'm asking is you pay your fair share. Pay your fair share, just like middle class folks do. But that isn't happening now. Today in this country right now, the top 1%, for example, evade an estimated a 160 billion in taxes that they owe each year.

And how do they do that?  There are only two ways not to pay taxes: one can do it legally through intelligent use of the tax code as it is written, or one can do it illegally and criminally by refusing to report income to the IRS.  Only in the latter case is the money actually owed to the government.  In the case of the former, laws as written say the taxes aren't owed, and that's neither illegal nor criminal.

Biden then went on to tell us that the wealthy are doing the latter.

The way it works is this. If you're a typical American, like I suspect most of the press people sitting in front of me here, you pay your taxes. Why? Because you get a W2 form. It comes in the mail every year. The IRS gets that information as well. Your taxes get deducted from your paycheck and you pay what is owed beyond that. That's why 99% of working people pay the taxes they owe. But that's not how it works for people with tens of millions of dollars. They play by a different set of rules, and they're often not employees themselves. So the IRS can't see what they make and can't tell if they're cheating. That's how many, the top 1% get away with paying virtually nothing. It's estimated by serious economists that that number is about $160 billion collectively owed each year that doesn't get paid.

Get that?  The wealthy owe money and owe it only because cheating.  Criminally cheating.  They don't report their income to the IRS and get away with it because their income doesn't show up on W2s.  That is a crime.  Biden has just accused them of criminal behavior.

And what's his solution?

My plan would help solve that. For example, it would give the IRS the resources it needs to keep up with the lawyers and accountants of the super wealthy. It would ask just for two pieces of information from the banks of these folks, the amounts that come into their bank accounts and what amounts go out of their bank accounts, so that the wealthy can no longer hide what they're making and they can finally begin to pay their fair share what they owe.

"Hiding" taxable income is a crime.

Biden then repeated his oft-rebutted claim that most of Trump's tax cuts went to the top 1%

Let me remind you, these are the same folks who just four years ago passed the Trump tax cut totaling almost 2 trillion in tax cuts, a giant giveaway to the largest corporations in the top 1%. 

At his long-overdue first press conference of March 25, Biden said:

Did you hear them complain when they passed close to $2 trillion Trump tax cut, 83% going to the top 1%. Do you hear them talk about that at all?

That is a lie.  According to factcheck.org:

He repeated two familiar talking points on taxes, including the misleading claim that "83%" of the benefits in the GOP's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act are "going to the top 1%." That only becomes the case in 2027 when most of the individual income tax cuts are set to expire but corporate tax cuts remain.

What's more, the only reason the tax cuts affected the rich is that the rich pay more in taxes to start with — you know, those rich that Biden said were not paying their "fair share" at all.

According to Issues & Insights:

First, let's dispose of the idea that the rich will pay all these taxes. They won't. The reason? Despite the left's propaganda to the contrary, the so-called rich already pay a far bigger share of total taxes than anyone else.

In 2018, the last year for which data are fully available, the top 1% earned 20.9% of all income, but paid a record 40.1% of all income taxes. That's up sharply since 2001, when the top earners paid "just" 33.2% of total income taxes.

Indeed, the top 1% paid more in taxes in 2018 than the bottom 90%, which paid just 28.6% of taxes. 

Biden proposes to open all banking records in the United States to IRS scrutiny.  He also is asking Americans to believe that all deposits into all bank accounts represent personal income and are taxable.

If Biden gets his way, it will be yet another major step forward in advancing a hi-tech fascist dictatorship.

Image: Screen shot from a camera aimed at a live television broadcast, filtered with FotoSketcher.

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