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i didn't know they paid taxes

The ones who ignored the Panama Papers

Where are the people who read past the headline into the actual finding?

The interesting part is they were able to determine total effective tax rate that accounts for taxes at all levels of government & for all sources of income & wealth beyond those reported by IRS statistics. They determined economic income (labor + capital income) by combining individual tax returns (income, estate, gift, etc.) & tax returns of businesses they owned. It more clearly shows how they avoid taxes: low individual taxable income relative to economic income (their income is mostly tied up in business ownership), low dividends by C-corporations they own, negative taxable income of passthrough business they own, low corporate taxes, and a recent decline of income & corporate tax rates with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. They also found the effective tax rate for the top wealthiest individuals was consistently less in Europe than the US over the examined period (2005–2020).

Interestingly, the top-end effective rates we obtain in the United States are higher than in Europe. In the Netherlands, Bruil et al. (2025) find an effective tax rate of less than 20% of economic income for the top 0.0001%, roughly the population of Dutch billionaires. Ring, Seim and Zucman (2025) obtain similar numbers in Sweden and Norway. In France, Bach et al. (2023) estimate an effective tax rate of 26% for the top 0.0002% in 2016 (vs. 30% for the top 0.0002% in our series pre-Tax Cuts and Jobs Acts). In Europe the individual income tax paid by billionaires is even lower than in the United States. As shown by Ring et al. (2025), this can be explained by the widespread use of personal wealth-holding companies, which allow ultra high-net-worth individuals in Europe to avoid the individual income tax, a technique heavily penalized in the United States since the 1930s.