Nearly a year after its season finale, devoted fans of the HBO series “Succession” can be excused if they’re still chugging full-body detox shakes three times a day. No multiseason show in the history of American television — fiction or non — has so extolled wanton capitalism, and with so much vitriol.
Take or leave its toxic plotlines and characters, “Succession” has at least tweaked viewers’ interest in today’s mega-corporate culture. Only real life billionaire CEOs can confirm whether “Succession” has much to with life among today’s insanely wealthy; but that’s not likely given for the last half-decade some of them have been dodging taxes by means the show’s toxic patriarch would be awed.
Such are the findings of a recent report describing how dozens of top executives outearned their businesses’ federal taxes paid for the years 2018-2022. According to the study done by the Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF), and Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), that’s because those businesses, 1) Massaged tax liabilities through use of loopholes, tax breaks and overall lax federal oversight; 2) Passed part of the savings onto happy shareholders and investors, and 3) Funneled extra millions in cash, stock options and incentives to their most aggressive bosses.
The tab for slighting the federal coffers for that period came to $275 billion — all in a few years’ work for the 342 corporate giants with, as ITEP’s senior fellow Matt Gardner described it “… a roomful of lawyers and accountants whose job it is to redefine taxable income, to move income around on paper in a way you hope will avoid taxes.”
As one might expect, Elon Musk’s Tesla was the overall baddest of the bad actors. The company scored $4.4 billion in profits, yet utilized offshore accounts and slack sales periods to virtually come out tax neutral. Meanwhile Musk banked a cool $2.28 billion in highly valuable stock options. (The rest of the very large pack includes some by now familiar repeat offenders: Ford, Bank of America, Netflix, Duke Energy and AT&T among them. The boilerplates and shell companies change, but not the tactics.)
The seeds for this particular spree of wealth hoarding were sown in 2017, with the Trump administration’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (2017). The key provision was a dramatic slash in the starting corporate rate, from 35% to 21%. President Biden has stopped the onslaught by imposing a 15% basement on corporate income, but any further progress lies in the balance come November.
The ATF/ITEP study confirms the ease with which commercial and other corporate enterprises can operate in their own best interests. We could hit the remote when “Succession” reached new bottoms. Not so, reality.
Don Rollins is a retired Unitarian Universalist minister in Jackson, Ohio. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2024
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