ProPublica's 'Billionaire Playbook' online event this evening
- By staff writer
- News
ProPublica
Above, a ProPublica image showing how tax avoidance strategies can enable a 'billionaire team owner' to pay less tax than the team's players, workers
ProPublica, the New York-based, non-profit investigative media organization that last year published a series of investigative articles exposing certain under-the-radar ways some wealthy individuals have been using in recent years to avoid having to pay taxes, is this evening hosting an online "virtual event" entitled "The Bllionaire Playbook", which it says will "seek to unpack" President Biden's recently-unveiled plans to address such tax-avoidance strategies.
The event's panelists will also "discuss how the federal tax system is broken (and who broke it); and explain why the federal tax code is key to reducing wealth inequality," beginning at 4pm EDT (9pm to 10pm, BST, 10pm to 11pm CEST), ProPublica adds, in an explanatory blurb on its website.
The speakers are set to include Binyamin Appelbaum, a business and economics writer who serves on the editorial board of the New York Times; University of Chicago law professor Daniel Hemel; ProPublica reporter Paul Kiel; and ProPublica senior reporter and editor Jesse Eisinger.
Among the techniques that ProPublica’s journalists found certain of the world's "ultrawealthy" to be using to shield their wealth from taxes, and which it says President Biden "takes direct aim at" in his recently-unveiled tax proposal, were the "writing off [of] losses incurred by thoroughbreds or sports teams" to, for example, in Peter Thiel’s case, "build a Roth IRA into a US$5bn tax shelter."
As reported, ProPublica's 2021 research revealed how some of America's wealthiest individuals have taken advantage of certain loopholes in the U.S. tax code in order to keep their annual (taxable) "income" to a minimum, by holding their existing wealth in the form of homes, yachts, shares in companies that they run and so on.
Among the ways such individuals are able to avoid taxes by doing this, ProPublica explains, because this type of asset becomes potentially taxable only at the point when its sold – if a gain is realized at that point, and even then, only if certain other potential tax loopholes have been exploited.
To sign up for today's online ProPublica event, click here.
