Workers In Poor Mississippi County Pay More Tax Than Trump: 'It's Not Fair'

[appalachiablue]

'It's not fair': workers in a poor Mississippi county pay more tax than Trump. The Guardian, Oct. 18, 2020. Tax authorities find it easier to audit earned income tax credit, which disproportionately affects poor communities of color, than to target billionaires.

Clumps of white fluff drift across the highway on the west side of the Mississippi Delta town of Belzoni. Cotton now grows from the beds of former catfish ponds. When catfish ponds in the self-proclaimed Catfish Capital of the World dried up, jobs went with them. Humphreys county, where Belzoni is located, has an unemployment rate double the national level.

But it is not entirely a forgotten southern backwater – at least, not to one government agency. Last year ProPublica reported that the Internal Revenue Service audits Humphreys county taxpayers at a higher rate than anywhere else in America.

About 12 out of 1,000 tax returns are audited each year in the county, according to the ProPublica analysis. That’s 53% higher than the national average and raises the question of why such a place is the subject of such IRS attention, rather than the haunts of millionaires and billionaires, like Manhattan and its one-time resident Donald Trump.

But in the most heavily audited county in the US, the recent shock news that Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017 was no surprise, said Joe Jackson, who was elected mayor of Belzoni last month.
“Most people around here are kind of adjusted to the idea that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” he said. “That’s not surprising to people in our area.” The local economy was already in a shambles when the coronavirus hit...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/18/tax-audit-earned-income-tax-credit-mississippi



- Belzoni, Mississippi.

[marmar]

1. A poor MS county that's 70+ percent African American is the most heavily audited?

Glaring example of how f**ked up this country is.

[appalachiablue]

2. It's outrageous and sickening. More, Miss. Delta poverty:

Last edited Sun Oct 18, 2020, 04:43 PM - Edit history (5)

- Poverty and progress in the Mississippi Delta, BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16385337