Income Inequality News Articles

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Ever since Bobbie Wert was 8 years old, her stomach has ached. Wert is part of a vast and mysterious panorama of pain that is increasing, sometimes with no obvious physical cause. And while chronic pain is a global problem, it is particularly puzzling in America. In other wealthy countries, it's the elderly who report the most chronic pain, which makes some sense. But in the United States it's the middle-aged – especially the jobless and people like Wert, who did not graduate from high school – who suffer the most. It is a plague on the less educated. All this raises the question: Is this physical suffering a canary in the coal mine warning us of larger dysfunction in our society? Chronic pain is not just a result of car accidents and workplace injuries but is also linked to troubled childhoods, loneliness, job insecurity and a hundred other pressures on working families. "People's lives are coming apart, and this leads to huge increases in physical pain," said Angus Deaton, a Nobel Prize winner in economics who with Anne Case popularized the term "deaths of despair." Americans die from deaths of despair – drugs, alcohol and suicide – at a rate of more than a quarter-million a year, and the number of walking wounded is far greater. Acute pain typically has a specific anatomical source – such as the shock you feel when you touch a hot stove – while chronic pain sometimes, not always, originates in the brain rather than the body.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Health Information Center.

Current COVID-19 lockdowns protect low-risk college students and young professional bankers, attorneys, journalists, scientists and others who can work from home, while older high-risk working-class people are risking their lives building the population immunity that will eventually protect us all. While mortality is inevitable during a pandemic, the COVID-19 lockdown strategy has led to more than 220,000 deaths, with the urban working class carrying the heaviest burden. Many older workers have been forced to accept high mortality risk or increased poverty, or both. While the current lockdowns are less strict than in March, the lockdown and contact tracing strategy is the worst assault on the working class since segregation and the Vietnam War. Lockdown policies have closed schools, businesses and churches, while not enforcing strict protocols to protect high-risk nursing home residents. Denying in-person teaching to students is harmful to their education and physical and mental health, with working-class children hardest hit. Online schooling puts a disproportional burden on our children, despite their own minimal risk. For ages 1 to 15, Sweden kept day care and schools open throughout the height of the pandemic, and among the 1.8 million children of that age, there were zero COVID-19 deaths without masks used or physical distancing. Neither was there any excess risk for in-person teachers compared with the average of other professions.

Note: The above article was written by three doctors, one from Stanford, one from Harvard, and one from the UK's Oxford. Explore an abundance of good information questioning the official story of COVID. Explore a summary of alternative views on the coronavirus. Explore a revealing article questioning the origin and causes of the coronavirus. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.

The U.S.’s historic economic expansion has so enriched one-percenters they now hold almost as much wealth as the middle- and upper-middle classes combined. The top 1% of American households have enjoyed huge returns in the stock market in the past decade, to the point that they now control more than half of the equity in U.S. public and private companies, according to data from the Federal Reserve. The very richest had assets of about $35.4 trillion in the second quarter, or just shy of the $36.9 trillion held by the tens of millions of people who make up ... much of the middle and upper-middle classes. It may not be long before one-percenters actually surpass the middle and upper-middle classes. Household wealth in the upper-most bracket grew by $650 billion in the second quarter of 2019, while Americans in the 50th to 90th percentiles saw a $210 billion gain. By another measurement the top 1% of taxpayers had incomes starting at $515,371 in 2017, according to the latest Internal Revenue Service data. For now, those Americans in 90th to 99th percentiles - well-to-do, but not the super rich - still control the biggest share of wealth, with $42.6 trillion in assets. The lone group left out of the fun: the bottom 50% of Americans. Those households have 35.7% of liabilities in the U.S. and just 6.1% of assets.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on income inequality from reliable major media sources.

For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans last year paid a lower total tax rate — spanning federal, state and local taxes — than any other income group, according to newly released data. That’s a sharp change from the 1950s and 1960s, when the wealthy paid vastly higher tax rates than the middle class or poor. Since then, taxes that hit the wealthiest the hardest — like the estate tax and corporate tax — have plummeted, while tax avoidance has become more common. President Trump’s 2017 tax cut, which was largely a handout to the rich, plays a role, too. It helped push the tax rate on the 400 wealthiest households below the rates for almost everyone else. The overall tax rate on the richest 400 households last year was only 23 percent, meaning that their combined tax payments equaled less than one quarter of their total income. This overall rate was 70 percent in 1950 and 47 percent in 1980. For middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate tax. And they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social Security) than in the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat. The combined result is that over the last 75 years the United States tax system has become radically less progressive.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and income inequality from reliable major media sources.

Gabriel Zucman started his first real job the Monday after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. A decade later, Zucman, 32, is an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the world’s foremost expert on where the wealthy hide their money. His doctoral thesis ... exposed trillions of dollars’ worth of tax evasion by the global rich. For his most influential work, he teamed up with his Berkeley colleague Emmanuel Saez. Their 2016 paper, “Wealth Inequality in the United States Since 1913,” distilled a century of data to answer one of modern capitalism’s murkiest mysteries: How rich are the rich in the world’s wealthiest nation? The answer - far richer than previously imagined - thrust the pair deep into the American debate over inequality. Zucman and Saez’s latest estimates show that the top 0.1% of taxpayers - about 170,000 families in a country of 330 million people - control 20% of American wealth, the highest share since 1929. The top 1% control 39% of U.S. wealth, and the bottom 90% have only 26%. The bottom half of Americans combined have a negative net worth. The shift in wealth concentration over time charts as a U, dropping rapidly through the Great Depression and World War II, staying low through the 1960s and ’70s, and surging after the ’80s as middle-class wealth rolled in the opposite direction. Zucman has also found that multinational corporations move 40% of their foreign profits, about $600 billion a year, out of the countries where their money was made and into lower-tax jurisdictions.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on income inequality from reliable major media sources.

The Federal Reserve recently reported that about half of Americans have virtually no wealth at all, with four in 10 unable to afford a $400 emergency expense. That means that if their car breaks down or their child gets sick, they have to charge those expenses to a credit card. And when they do that, they get ripped off — big time. Despite the fact that banks can borrow money from the Fed at less than 2.5%, the median credit card interest rate ... is now over 21%. Last year, Wall Street banks made $113 billion in credit card interest alone, up by nearly 50% in just five years. In other words, while working class Americans pay outrageously high interest rates, Wall Street banks get rich. And if you live in a low-income community without a bank or cannot get a credit card, what do you do when you need to borrow money? You may have to turn to a predatory payday lender where the average interest rate on an annual basis is a jaw-dropping 391%. When banks and payday lenders charge these unconscionably high interest rates, they are not engaged in the business of making credit available. They are involved in extortion. We need a national usury law that caps interest rates ... at 15%. And that's exactly what the legislation I introduced with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would do. Under our Loan Shark Prevention Act, we would make sure that no bank or store in America could charge an interest rate higher than 15%. 88% of Americans support a cap on credit card interest rates.

Note: The above was written by Senator Bernie Sanders. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on financial industry corruption and income inequality.

The audit rate for Americans earning more than $5 million a year plunged to just over 2% in 2019 from over 16% in 2010, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog. The report estimated that taxpayers underreported their income tax by a combined $245 billion a year between 2011 and 2013, and said that "taxpayers are more likely to voluntarily comply with the tax laws if they believe their return may be audited." The main reason for the decline, according to the report, is a lack of IRS funding. In fiscal year 2021, the agency's budget was $11.9 billion – $200 million less than its 2010 budget. The IRS also has seen its staffing levels fall to the same levels as 1973. The decline in funding and auditors means that taxpayers, and especially the top earners, are far less likely to get caught underpaying their taxes than a decade ago. Overall audit rates for American taxpayers fell to 0.2% in 2019 from 0.9% in 2010. The wealthy are still audited at a higher rate than the general taxpayer population. Yet their audit rates have declined at a much higher rate. The audit rate for taxpayers earning between $5 million and $10 million fell to 1.4% from 13.5%. Those earning more than $10 million saw their audit rate fall to 3.9% in 2019 from 21.2% in 2010, while audit rates for $10 million-plus earners ticked up slightly for the 2017 and 2018 tax years due to a Treasury Department mandate to impose audit rates of at least 8% on those making $10 million or more.

Note: For more along these lines, see key news articles on the financial industry from reliable major media sources.

The political and economic power wielded by the approximately 750 wealthiest people in America has become a sudden flash point in the 2020 presidential election, as the nation’s billionaires push back with increasing ferocity against calls by liberal politicians to vastly reduce their fortunes and clout. On Thursday, Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire and former mayor of New York City, took steps to enter the presidential race, a move that would make him one of four billionaires who either plan to seek or have expressed interest in seeking the nation’s highest office in 2020. His decision came one week after Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) proposed vastly expanding her “wealth tax” on the nation’s biggest wealth holders and one month after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said America should not have any billionaires at all. The leaders of the anti-billionaire populist surge, Warren and Sanders, have cast their plans to vastly increase taxes on the wealthy as necessary to fix several decades of widening inequality. Financial disparities between the rich and everyone else have widened over the past several decades in America, with inequality returning to levels not seen since the 1920s, as the richest 400 Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 60 percent of the wealth distribution. At least 16 billionaires have in recent months spoken out against what they regard as the danger posed by the populist Democrats, particularly over their proposals to enact a “wealth tax” on vast fortunes.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on income inequality from reliable major media sources.

There is only one group of people that matter the most: those who Dr. Peter Phillips, professor emeritus at Sonoma State University, calls the "titans of capital." In his new book by the same name, Phillips studies the economic trends following the COVID-19 pandemic and how the wealth concentration in the world took a dramatic turn towards the already ultra-wealthy. The main problem is simple to understand: the ultra-wealthy "doubled their wealth concentration." That means, according to Phillips, that "the upper one half of 1% of the people got richer and basically, the rest of the world got poorer." Phillips names the top 10 capital investment companies, such as BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Morgan Stanley and others as the main culprits. Over $50 trillion are controlled by 117 people across these 10 companies, according to Phillips. This immense concentration of wealth inevitably renders any semblance of democracy almost useless, as the main decision makers are those who hold the biggest bag. And then there's policy groups. The largest now is the World Economic Forum, which is the top 2,000 to 3,000 corporations in the world send their CEOs there, to Davos every year. And there's a global leaders attend, and they're talking about a better capitalism, a state, what they call stakeholders capitalism, in other words, capitalism with a conscience. It's not working. They're not doing anything different, other than allowing the continued concentration of capital globally.

Note: Read more about how the ultra-wealthy profited immensely from the COVID economy. For more along these lines, explore concise summaries of news articles on corporate corruption and financial inequality from reliable major media sources.

The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) joined Popular Democracy in compiling a 71-page report titled Billionaire Blowback on Housing. The two groups found that a small number of wealthy individuals and their investment arms, who control "huge pools of wealth," have spent some of their vast resources on "predatory investment and wealth-parking in luxury housing." Billionaires and their investment firms, such as Blackstone–now the world's largest corporate landlord–are "taking advantage of the tight low-income rental market, lack of publicly funded affordable housing, displacement after the foreclosure crisis, and inaccessible homeownership to get into the business of single-family and multifamily home rentals, and buying up mobile home parks," the report reads. Blackstone now owns 300,000 residential units across the U.S. and nearly doubled its portfolio in 2021. The housing crisis ... is characterized by record-breaking homelessness in 2023 with more than 653,000 people unhoused; half of tenants paying more than 30% of their income on rent ... and a significantly widened gap between the income needed to buy a house and the actual cost of a home. The number of vacant units in some communities exceed the number of unhoused people. For example, in 2017 there were more than 93,500 vacant units in Los Angeles and an estimated 36,000 unhoused residents, with vacancies treated as "a structural feature of the market thanks to the presence of a small class of wealthy investors who engage in speculative financial behavior."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on banking system corruption and financial inequality from reliable major media sources.

The Gates Foundation is a major influencer and funder of agricultural development in Africa, yet there are no avenues to hold the foundation accountable to the communities it influences. Gates Foundation is the main funder of the controversial AGRA program. AGRA rebranded after evidence-based critiques showed that its 15-year effort to expand high-input, chemical-dependent monoculture farming in Africa has failed to provide food security, despite billions in funding from private donors and government subsidies. Critics say the "green revolution" approach is exacerbating hunger, worsening inequality and entrenching the power of outside corporate agribusiness interests in the hungriest regions of the world. AGRA works to transition farmers away from traditional seeds and crops to patented seeds, fossil-fuel based fertilizers and other inputs to grow commodity crops for the global market. The strategy is modeled on the Indian "green revolution" that boosted production of staple crops but also left a legacy of structural inequity and escalating debt for farmers. Evidence suggests that the green revolution has failed to improve health or reduce poverty and has created many problems. These include hooking farmers in a debt cycle with expensive inputs, growing pesticide use, environmental degradation, worsening soil quality, reduced diversity of food crops, and increased corporate control over food systems.

Note: 50 food sovereignty organizations wrote an open letter to Bill Gates on how the Green Revolution has failed to reduce hunger or increase food access as promised. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on food system corruption and income inequality from reliable major media sources.

While you may be feeling the pain from high prices at restaurants and supermarkets, many companies making and selling the products are doing remarkably well. Most have seen their profits jump as they continue raising prices on customers. Some companies say they have no choice but to pass inflationary pain on to consumers. Others, however, acknowledge they are exploiting the inflationary atmosphere to raise prices, or to shrink product sizes. Meanwhile, companies spent billions rewarding investors with stock buybacks. Menu and grocery store prices may remain elevated. In earnings calls, executives detail plans to maintain high prices even as some costs are falling. The companies' net profits are up by a median of 51% since just prior to the pandemic, and in one case as much as 950%. The average American worker has not fared as well: wages are only up 5% since inflation's peak. For the lowest earners, food price increases during the last two years are outpacing wage gains by over 340%. Kroger's CEO told investors in June 2022, "a little bit of inflation is always good for our business", while Hostess's CEO said rising prices across the economy "helps" it profit because they can raise prices to levels that exceed their increased costs. Food prices have increased more than most other industries, federal data shows. While prices in the economy overall have risen by around 16% since mid-2022, families are now paying 19% more for food.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on food system corruption and income inequality from reliable major media sources.

As Wall Street buys up entire neighborhood blocks, driving up corporate purchases of single-family homes to historic highs, housing advocates warn companies ... are harming their tenants and pricing out would-be homebuyers. Now policymakers in states across the country and Washington, DC, are finally beginning to push back – but they're facing the might of a powerful new single-family rental lobby. Driven by the pandemic-era real estate boom, corporate landlords are ramping up their purchases of assets like apartment buildings and mobile home communities nationwide. They're especially active in fast-growing Sun Belt markets like Phoenix and Atlanta, where more than a third of homes on the market are now being purchased by private equity firms like Blackstone or dedicated single-family rental companies. Even Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has entered the single-family housing market. Critics say that such companies' encroaching presence in the housing market and their focus on short-term profits are pricing out first-time homebuyers and gentrifying neighborhoods, contributing to an ongoing housing crisis. A 2022 study by federal lawmakers found that five major rental companies hiked their fees by 40 percent over a three-year period and saw their tenants fall behind in rent. In California, the state's largest corporate landlord, Invitation Homes, was forced to pay $2 million in sanctions after the state attorney general found it was charging tenants illegally high rents.

Note: Read about the shadowy global interests buying up land all over the US. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on financial system corruption and income inequality from reliable major media sources.

On an October morning, a small army arrived to evict Rudy Ortega from his home in the Crash Zone, an encampment located near the end of the airport runway in San Jose, California. The camp, one of the largest in California, was cleared between 2021 and 2023 in part by a private company named Tucker Construction. Public spending on private sweep contractors is soaring across California. In total, private firms have been paid at least $100m to clear homeless camps, an investigation by the Guardian and Type Investigations has found. Pete White, the founder of the Los Angeles Community Action Network ... says he's observed a steady increase in the privatization of sweeps in recent years. "The growth of a private industry geared towards removing and dismantling informal settlements and houseless encampments has grown steadily in Los Angeles and across the country," said White. "Not only are we seeing a growth in the loss of property, but also the loss of rights." Firms vying for contracts to sweep encampments in California include mid-size construction companies that also do home renovations, as well as large environmental services firms that specialize in cleaning up hazardous waste and responding to public emergencies. A study of the health impacts of sweeps where the Crash Zone is located found that unhoused residents often lost medicines and other "health necessities" and that sweeps "drove unhoused people into hazardous, isolated, less visible spaces". As well as the loss of their homes, they allege the destruction of belongings that rules are meant to protect.

Note: Read more about the unprecedented rise in food costs that are leaving millions of Americans facing higher prices and growing food insecurity. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the corporate world from reliable major media sources.

When Rafael Correa entered Ecuador's presidency in 2007, the nation faced an opportunity and a challenge. Ecuador's economy depended on oil, and global crude prices were near a record high. Much of the oil was extracted by foreign companies ... as prices surged more wealth began flowing overseas. Soon after taking office, Correa increased a recently enacted windfall tax on oil companies. The idea was to use the tax as leverage to extract better terms from the companies. Within months, two oil companies working as partners–the independent Anglo-French firm Perenco and Burlington Resources, a subsidiary of ConocoPhillips–ceased paying the tax and sued the government through a system of international tribunals known as investor state dispute settlements, or ISDS. The system allows foreign investors to sue governments before tribunals outside the jurisdiction of national courts. Perenco and Burlington [convinced] arbitrators in two separate tribunals to award the companies more than $800 million. Critics say the ISDS system gives corporations an exclusive, parallel justice system that elevates foreign interests above human rights and environmental concerns. The vast majority of cases have been brought by companies based in North America or Europe against governments in Latin America, Africa and Asia, prompting many critics to liken the ISDS system to a form of market-based colonialism that continues to extract wealth from the Global South.

Note: According to the analysis in the article, fossil fuel companies and investors filed one in five of 1,720 claims since the 1970s, and "have been awarded at least $82.8 billion in compensation from governments." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption and income inequality from reliable major media sources.

According to the World Health Organization definition, 1.9 billion adults are considered overweight. Of these, more than 650 million people are classified as obese. In Australia, health authorities suggest being overweight is more dangerous to us than alcohol, and only second in "preventable health risk" to smoking. ABS health data claims 67% of Australian adults are overweight, an increase on 63.4% a decade ago. Last year, Australia's former conservative government released a "National Obesity Strategy", concerned Australia was facing health risks of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancers. That government did recognise weight is influenced by complex "social, environmental, and economic factors", but their framework of encouraging "healthy choices" as a remedy unhelpfully individualises a collective problem. First, shaming individuals into weight loss doesn't work. 95% of weight loss attempts fail. Two-thirds of dieters regain the weight they lose. Second, the structural giveaway here is an admission that the poorest "experience the greatest burden of disease linked to excess weight". Our societies have never produced so much food, yet we live in a capitalist perversion where fresh, healthy food – and the time to prepare it – are priced as a luxury, while highly processed items are inexpensive, easy and aggressively mass-marketed. It's not a failure of collective willpower that's jeopardising our health, but a diet of bad food that's culturally familiar, low in nutrition and super available.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on food system corruption from reliable major media sources.

Douglas Rushkoff's new book, "Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires," opens with a surreal scene: For a fee equal to one-third of his annual salary as a professor, Rushkoff flies to a luxurious resort to advise five ultrawealthy men on how to survive the collapse of civilization. More terrifying than the men's Hollywood-derived nightmares is their naive and profoundly antisocial response: They'd rather optimize their bunkers than work to avert the apocalypse. While few have the means to indulge dystopian fantasies so lavishly, the men are an extreme instance of a broader trend. Bunker sales in America are soaring, and the market now caters to a range of income levels, from $40,000 starter bunkers to a nearly $10 million Luxury Series "Aristocrat" that offers a pool and a bowling lane. Many people now seem fixated on stockpiling enough money to protect themselves from the rest of the world, rather than considering the sort of world they are creating by making money in these ways. Rushkoff ... calls this dynamic the "Insulation Equation." Anyone who asks some version of the question – can I earn enough money doing X to insulate myself from the effects of doing X – is considering the Insulation Equation. The Insulation Equation is a provocative and illuminating concept, and Rushkoff devotes much of the book to tracing the manifestations and origins of a mind-set that seduces people into believing they can insulate themselves from harms they help create.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on income inequality from reliable major media sources.

More than 10 years after the housing crash that devastated the economy, people are still debating just what happened. Although the economy and the housing market have made a comeback, homeownership remains low. Aaron Glantz, a prize-winning investigative journalist ... set out to explain why, in "Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream." Eight million Americans lost their homes in the bust. Where did those homes go? Those houses didn’t just disappear. Who won, when everyone else lost? The people who won - a small group of businessmen who pounced to seize thousands of homes and made billions of dollars - they’re the “homewreckers.” But even though the housing bust is over, the nation’s homeownership rate is at its lowest in 50 years, and continues to go down. It helps explain why people feel so uneasy. As long as the unemployment rate is low and people have jobs and they can afford rents, the financial market is secure. If people lose their jobs, what’s going to happen? We could be back in another housing bust. Right now there’s a real crisis of affordability. People think we don’t have enough inventory because we haven’t built enough houses. Only 10 years ago, our country was awash in real estate. We have to ask ourselves if we really have a housing shortage, or if we have rigged the market so it only benefits a few of the players.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on income inequality from reliable major media sources.

Rutger Bregman had not really intended to stick it to the global elite. But when the Dutch historian decided to go off-piste at the World Economic Forum and tell the assembled billionaires they should stop avoiding paying tax, he became an overnight social media sensation. “It’s been a crazy week and just for stating the obvious,” said Bregman, when asked about a panel discussion at the WEF last month in which he said the issue was “taxes, taxes, taxes, and all the rest is bullshit in my opinion”. Bregman had not been to Davos before. He was invited on the basis of the book Utopia for Realists, which argued for a basic income and a shorter working week. But he grew more irritated as the week wore on. He was surprised and maddened by the pushback when he mentioned tax. As a result, Bregman decided to change his plan for a panel on inequality. What Bregman said, put simply, was the Davos emperors have no clothes. They talk a lot about how something must be done about inequality and the need to address social unrest, but cavil at the idea they might be a big part of the problem. He told his audience that people in Davos talked about participation, justice, equality and transparency, but “nobody raises the issue of tax avoidance and the rich not paying their share. It is like going to a firefighters’ conference and not talking about water.” As a historian, Bregman noted the most successful period for capitalism occurred in the years after the second world war, when the top rate of tax in the US was above 90%.

Note: This historian later confronted Tucker Carlson of Fox News, who had a few choice dirty words for him. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on income inequality and corporate corruption.

Whether dodging taxes or legal peril, wealthy Americans often succeed in concealing assets from the government by hiding their money in offshore bank accounts. Research from the IRS and a group of economists last year found that the top 1% of earners in the U.S. neglect to report 20% of their income – and that random audits almost never detect offshore accounts. Tax havens like Switzerland or the Cayman Islands have traditionally offered Americans a place to hide their assets because they fiercely guard financial privacy and have minimal to no taxes. Often, they also have laws that inhibit scrutiny from foreign tax officials. Prior to his latest book, [author Patrick Radden] Keefe published "Empire of Pain," which chronicled the billionaire Sackler family's connection to the nation's opioid epidemic. The Sacklers, the notorious family that owned the now bankrupt Purdue Pharma, reportedly have much of their wealth hidden in offshore accounts. An audit commissioned by Purdue showed the family withdrew more than $10 billion from their company during the opioid crisis, CNN reported in October 2020. They began drawing especially large amounts of money from the firm after paying $600 million in a 2007 plea deal with the Justice Department for misleading physicians and consumers about the opioid OxyContin, CNN reported. "The kind of sophistication of the whole industry of financial dissimulation ... such that nobody can put their hands on the money, is really interesting." Keefe told Yahoo Finance.

Note: A 2015 Guardian newspaper article further describes how the US helps the super-rich hide assets. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of financial industry corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.

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