A Sweet New Century for America’s Most Privileged While Wealth Inequality Is Spectacularly Worse

How much worse? We now have a new report from the Washington, D.C.-based Institute on Taxation and Economic and Policy that offers a distressing new answer.

The Institute’s researchers looked at all the major tax bills that members of Congress have passed — and Presidents have signed into law — since the start of our 21st century, every piece of legislation right up through the GOP tax cut signed into law this past December.

The researchers then calculated what households have paid in taxes under the new tax laws, for each year since 2000, and what they would have paid if Congress this century had made no changes to the nation’s tax code.

Taxpayers would have paid, the researchers found, $5.1 trillion more in taxes had America’s tax laws not changed. Who benefited from these trillions in tax savings?

Lawmakers have been assuring us, all along the way, that we would all benefit.

“This is about helping hard-working taxpayers across the board,” promised Rep. Erik Paulsen of Minnesota last November as Republicans on the House Ways and means Committee began pushing the most recent of this century’s tax cuts into law.

But some Americans have benefited quite a bit more than others — and many others have barely seen any benefit at all.

All told, only 3 percent of this century’s tax cut savings have gone to America’s poorest 20 percent. Taxpayers at the other end of America’s income spectrum, those fortunate souls in the top 20 percent, have grabbed 65 percent of those savings, nearly two-thirds of the total.

Within that top 20 percent, well over half the benefits have gone to the top 5 percent, and over half those top 5 percent benefits have gone to the top 1 percent.

Steve Wamhoff, one of the Institute on Taxation and Economic and Policy researchers, has another interesting frame on the numbers.

“If you look at the richest 1 percent,” he notes, “they’re getting more than the bottom 60 percent of Americans.”

The exact numbers: The top 1 percent have grabbed 22 percent of the total savings from this century’s major tax bills. The bottom 60 percent have taken in just 19 percent of the total.

This century’s tax cuts have clearly not been about “helping hard-working taxpayers across the board.” They’ve been about tossing crumbs to people working two and three jobs to make ends meet and rewarding the already rich — with new yachts. Literally.

This past November, on the same day the full U.S. House of Representatives gave a green light to the latest GOP tax cut, the Florida mega-millionaire who chairs the House subcommittee in charge of writing new tax policies — Rep. Vern Buchanan —  spent somewhere over $3.25 million buying a new yacht.

Buchanan, the eighth-richest lawmaker in Congress, had good reason to celebrate. The tax cut signed into law this past December will save him as much as $2.1 million a year in taxes.