Taxes, The Rich | featured news

You can tell a lot by a country by how it deals with a new world of a plutocratic elite for whom national boundaries are but arbitrary lines on a map. And you can tell a lot about individual members of that elite by how they choose to deal with a world in which countries compete for their affections with low taxes.

France’s new 75 percent income tax on the rich may not be popular with millionaires. But it’s being cheered by another group: Paris real-estate buyers. Real estate agents say that the number of multimillion-dollar real-estate listings in Paris has jumped more than 25 percent over last year – due in part to the threat of the new income tax. More than 400 new listings have come onto the luxury real-estate market over the past six months, they say.

Now, at least, there can be no doubt about who is waging class warfare in this presidential campaign. Mitt Romney would pit the winners against the “victims,” the smug-and-rich against the down-on-their-luck, the wealthy tax avoiders against those too poor to owe income tax. He sees nearly half of all Americans as chumps who sit around waiting for a handout.

As the income gap between rich and poor widens, a majority of Americans say the growing divide is bad for the country and believe that wealthy people are not paying enough in taxes, according to a new survey. The poll released Monday by the Pew Research Center points to a particular challenge for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, whose party's policies are viewed by a wide majority as favoring the rich over the middle class and poor.

Thanks to lax international tax rules the world’s super rich have siphoned at least $21 trillion into secretive tax-free havens, according to a study by UK campaign group Tax Justice Network.

Americans support raising taxes on the rich by a two-to-one margin, with many believing an increase would both help the economy and make the tax system fairer, according to a Pew poll released Monday afternoon. Forty-four percent of adults surveyed said that raising taxes on incomes above $250,000 would help the economy and increase fairness, while 22 percent said it would hurt the economy and 21 percent that it would make the system less fair.

Occupy Wall Street is going on the road – a two-week walk to Washington. A small group of activists plans to leave Manhattan's Zuccotti Park at noon Wednesday and arrive by the Nov. 23 deadline for a congressional committee to decide whether to keep President Barack Obama's extension of Bush-era tax cuts. Protesters say the cuts benefit only rich Americans.

The IRS says 1,470 millionaires paid no federal income taxes in 2009.

As Monday's tax filing deadline nears, ponder this: The super rich pay a lot less taxes than they did a couple of decades ago, and nearly half of U.S. households pay no income taxes at all.

A former Swiss banker on Monday supplied documents to WikiLeaks that he alleges detail attempts by wealthy business leaders and lawmakers to evade tax payments.