To Fight Inequality, Tax The Patriarchy And Invest In Care

If billionaires and corporations pay their share of taxes, there would be more than enough revenue to invest in child care, paid leave, and home care.

By Rebekah Entralgo, Inequality.org

While millions of households across the United States are scrambling to file — or extend — their taxes by the April 19th deadline, members of our billionaire class are doing a great deal more smiling than scrambling.

Why? Because the U.S. tax code is built to reward wealth over work and serves big corporate interests over working families.

Trillions of dollars goes untaxed each year, deftly squirreled away by tax professionals hired by the nation’s wealthy and powerful or left untouched because the federal government doesn’t tax wealth as it does income.

Over one recent five-year period, a bombshell ProPublica investigation from 2022 revealed, the 25 richest Americans paid a true tax rate of roughly 3.4 percent. This means nurses, teachers, firefighters, and other middle class frontline workers paid a larger share of their income in taxes than America’s billionaires.

Corporations, too, are skilled at avoiding taxation. In 2020, at least 55 of the largest corporations in America paid no federal corporate income taxes despite enjoying substantial pretax profits in the United States.