Ingrid

“The wealthy have also fought to underfund and defang the Internal Revenue Service, so it doesn’t have the resources to audit or fight dubious deductions. Only about 6 percent of tax returns of those with income of more than $1 million are audited, along with 0.7 percent of business tax returns. Meanwhile, there is one group that the IRS scrutinizes rigorously: the working poor with incomes below $20,000 a year who receive the Earned Income Tax Credit. More than one-third of all tax audits are focused on that group struggling to make ends meet, even as the agency cuts back on audits of the wealthy—while the top 5 percent of taxpayers account for more than half of all underreported income.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“One of the most infuriating elements of American myopia about investing in at-risk kids is that politicians often insist that they don't have the funds to pay for social services, but they somehow find the resources to pay for prisons later on. Republican lawmakers don't want to pay for $500 IUDs for low-income women, so they pay $17,000 for Medicaid births. They don't want to pay to reduce lead poisoning, even though that means paying for special education classes for years to come.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

“Life expectancy continues to rise in most of the rest of the industrialized world, but in the United States it has dropped for three years in a row—for the first time in a century. As we’ll see, American kids today are 55 percent more likely to die by the age of nineteen than children in the other rich countries that are members of the OECD, the club of industrialized nations. America now lags behind its peer countries in health care and high-school graduation rates while suffering greater violence, poverty and addiction. This dysfunction damages all Americans: it undermines our nation’s competitiveness, especially as growing economies like China’s are fueled by much larger populations and by rising education levels, and may erode the well-being of our society for decades to come. The losers are not just those at the bottom of society, but all of us. For America to be strong, we must strengthen all Americans.”
― Nicholas D. Kristof, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

“There are the subsidies to the wealthy like the carried-interest tax loophole or the mortgage subsidy for yachts. By some calculations, corporate subsidies, credits, and loopholes are 50% higher than entitlements to the poor, not including medicare and medicaid.Some of the other subsidies are outlandish. Put a few goats on your golf course and you can classify it as farmland, as President Trump did, and you can save large sums in taxes. The tax code has come to serve the wealthy in myriad of ways.”
― Nicholas D. Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn