The New York Times detailed President Donald Trump’s years of competitive tax evasion in his explosive report, which is evident from the figures and adds the fact that it has not paid any federal source of income tax in the subsequent 15 years and paid only $750. a year in 2016 and 2017, that Trump might have crossed a legal line, but that’s not the point.

The real scandal is not whether Trump cheated for not paying millions of dollars in taxes, but our tax formula is designed to allow other wealthy people like him to pay taxes without breaking a singles law. Trump would possibly have taken tax evasion to the extreme. However, these schemes are far from exclusive among the ranks of the ultrarricos. For them and for the politicians they donate to, this type of tax evasion is a feature, not a mistake, of our tax code.

Most Americans perceive at some point that our government and our fiscal formula are sessed in favor of the rich and powerful, but few of them have a concept of how things are mingled. We have a tax code riddled with loopholes that only the rich can have. , all in an eco-formula of vast wealth coverage that gives millionaires and billers endless functions to lower their tax bill at the point of what ordinary American staff pay.

The game is manipulated from start to finish. You don’t even have to abuse hard-to-understand flaws for the rich to face them. The special remedy for the rich is enshrined in the maximum fundamental building blocks of the tax code.

Most Americans have to paint for a living and pay taxes on what they earn. The rich, on the other hand, make a living as a giant with their investments, which are taxed at a rate well below the popular source of income tax. The long-term capital gains rate is only 20%, which means that a billionaire who makes millions of dollars a year with his investments will end up with a lower maximum tax rate than a user running for a salary of only $41,000.

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I saw this difference manifest firsthand when I retired from Wall Street to make a living from my investments. I make as much cash as I used to, but now that I no longer apply, my tax bill has dropped considerably instead of paying a tax rate in the mid-1930s, I pay a maximum tax rate sometime in my teens without employing any of the known loopholes in Trump’s tax returns.

None of this is accidental. A tax code doesn’t seem simply by magic, all of this has been intentionally enshrined in the tax code through elected officials who now come with President Trump Trump himself and Congressional Republicans have absolutely rewritten the federal tax code with the 2017 tax cuts. and Jobs Act. Unsurprisingly, this comes with many more opportunities for the rich not to pay their fair share, adding some provisions like a new deduction for passing businesses that were perfectly designed to help some genuine real estate developer living at White. House.

Nor is it unexpected that when wealthy Americans like Trump cross the line between popular tax evasion and absolute violation of the law, they threaten to get away with it. From 2011 to 2019, the percentage of millionaires audited through the Internal Revenue Service increased from 12%. just 3%, for what? Because IRS law enforcement has been systematically suspended through conservatives for a decade, the firm lost 29% of its enforcement resources between 2010 and 2018, depriving it of investment and wanting to audit the rich with confusing finances.

Bring it: Trump needs to run on his record. We hope he does. It’s a crisis for America.

This mix of inept application and intentionally regressive policies combine to create a formula that not only allows for the kind of habit detailed in Trump’s tax returns, but also encourages it. Being even angrier than that is what our formula is designed for. If they want genuine change, they want to focus their power on empowering all wealthy Americans, not just Trump.

Morris Pearl, president of The Patriotic Millionaires, is the former CEO of BlackRock Investments. Follow him on Twitter: @morris_pearl

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