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Why you may be paying a higher tax rate than the wealthiest Americans · Apple News Today

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  Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Monday, April 18th. I'm Shumita Basu.
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  Duarte Geraldino, Narrating: And I'm Duarte Geraldino. This is "Apple News Today." Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news, and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
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  Basu: We have been watching for updates on Mariupol all weekend. Russia issued an ultimatum on Sunday to the last standing Ukrainian troops in Mariupol: surrender the city or face destruction. The troops refused. As of early Monday morning, Russian forces are reportedly close to capturing the city. Ukrainian authorities say bombardments rocked other cities in the least and the west over the weekend.
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  Geraldino: Coming out of Holy Week and Easter Sunday, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church is getting a lot of criticism. "The Washington Post" looks at Patriarch Kirill. He's become one of the most prominent voices in Russia, backing the war. This Russian Orthodox bishop is justifying the invasion with religious dogma.
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  Basu: Kirill is pushing the concept that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are one people. Now, that might sound inclusive at first, but critics say Putin is using this ideology to reassert dominance over territory that Russia used to control during the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
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  Geraldino: This bishop and his propagandistic sermons are creating a rift in the global Orthodox Church. The "Post" reports more than 300 Orthodox priests in Ukraine signed an open letter asking global Church leaders for a formal inquiry into whether Kirill should be removed from his post.
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  Basu: One Church scholar put it this way to the "Post": "any war has to have guns and ideas." In this case, the Kremlin is providing the guns, and the Church is providing the ideas.
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  Geraldino: It's tax day, and that means if you're like the average single worker who earns $45,000 a year, you're paying 21% of your earnings in taxes. Now, if you're married with a child and make at least $200,000 dollars, your tax rate might be closer to 26%.
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  But if you are among the wealthiest Americans, your effective tax rate could be closer to just 4%. That's according to "ProPublica." Paul Kiel is one of the reporters behind this investigation…
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  Paul Kiel: The richest people tend not to have the form of income that is subject to payroll taxes.
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  Basu: As Kiel explains, we have a clear system for taxing wages, not so much for taxing investments.
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  Kiel: I think our system is very good and efficient at taxing labor or taxing wages. It's almost seamless. It comes right out of your paycheck every month, in terms of the tax withheld. But taxing business income, taxing wealth growth, is something that our tax system… there's a lot more wiggle room. It's much more susceptible to manipulation.
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  "ProPublica" has been investigating the tax records of the top earners since last summer. Their latest piece looks at the tax filings of the top 400 American earners over a five-year period, from 2013 to 2018. These are people who are making an average of at least $110 million annually. This investigation found that billionaires in the tech industry are paying the lowest tax rate. Now, part of the reason their tax rates are so low is most of their wealth is accumulated in investments, like stocks.
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  Kiel: If you get richer and you don't turn it into the form of income that ends up in your tax return-- so, for instance, if you get richer because you own a lot of stock, and it goes up ten billion in a year, if you don't sell it, you don't get taxed on that. And so we've looked at that as a measure of income, which is not what our tax system does, but is what an economist would generally consider, you know, a form of income if you're getting that much wealthier.
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  Geraldino: Huge charitable donations also help wealthy people keep taxes low. Take Michael Bloomberg, for example. He earned an average of $2 billion during the tax years "ProPublica" examined, but because he made such huge charitable donations, he was able to deduct two thirds of his income. His effective tax rate was around 4%.
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  Basu: Others, like Warren Buffet, use a strategy known as "Buy, Borrow, Die," essentially keeping income as low as possible to avoid taxes and instead borrowing against their wealth to fund their lifestyles.
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  Geraldino: And then there are the money managers. Executives and founders of private equity companies use loopholes that allow them to report fees from managing clients' money as investment income, which is taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income.
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  Basu: All of these tax avoidance measures are perfectly legal, but for a system that's, at least in theory, designed so that the richest pay their share, the question is, is the current system fair? President Biden and many Democrats don't think so.
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  Kiel: President Biden had a proposal a couple weeks ago that he called "the billionaire minimum income tax," and basically the idea was to get at this form of income that's not effectively taxed, the wealth growth that billionaires are able to avoid turning into income on a tax return. To tax that, as opposed to allowing them to sidestep the system. And that was a sort of proposal that a president has never made before. Of course that doesn't mean it's gonna pass in this Congress.
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  Geraldino: More than 50 workers have been killed driving for companies like Lyft, DoorDash, and Uber since 2017. That's according to a report put together by the advocacy group Gig Workers Rising.
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  Basu: Gig workers tend to have odd hours, minimal to no benefits, and if something happens to them on the job, there isn't a whole lot of legal recourse their families can pursue. Here's NPR's Bobby Allyn…
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  Bobby Allyn: The gig companies like Lyft and Uber have spent, you know, tens of millions of dollars to ensure that the workers who drive cars for them stay independent contractors. This is absolutely pivotal to these companies' business model. And what that means is if you are hurt on the job, you can't file for workers' compensation.
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  Geraldino: Allyn says the very nature of their work, picking up strangers in strange neighborhoods, often late at night, that makes it inherently dangerous. Allyn told us about Bella Lewis, who was a Lyft driver in the Dallas area. She was killed on the job.
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  Allyn: She picked someone up in this sort of industrial parking lot and she didn't think much of it. I mean, she does this almost every single day, and you pick up hundreds of passengers. You don't really think twice about picking someone up in, really, any location. But this individual got in the backseat of the car, shot and killed her, pulled her out of the car, and then drove away in her vehicle.
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  Basu: As NPR reports, firms like Lyft make drivers sign what are known as "forced arbitration agreements." These agreements prevent drivers from suing if they get injured or if something goes wrong while they're working. Families can't file wrongful death lawsuits.
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  Allyn: So the families I spoke to think that they should be owed, at the very least, funeral expenses, burial expenses, and just some kind of compensation to help them deal with the actual cost of burying their loved one. And maybe some compensation to make them whole, to sort of help them with the grieving process. These are grieving families, many of them working class families who lost someone at no fault of their own because a stranger got into their vehicle and killed them.
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  Geraldino: In the case of Bella Lewis, her family paid for the funeral and burial bills. Lyft didn't respond to NPR's questions about why it didn't help with funeral expenses. A spokesperson said the company tried to get in touch with the family, but Bella's sister says she never heard from them.
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  We are living in the golden age of unique baby names. Maybe you can credit celebrities who fight over who gets to name their kid "Wolf," or even just a string of characters. But whether it's their influence or not, a lot of parents are under pressure to come up with a unique name, and some of these parents are willing to pay for help.
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  Basu: "The New Yorker" recently profiled a professional baby namer. Last year, she helped name more than 100 babies. For one of her clients, she suggested the name "Parks," since the parents had their first kiss in a town called "Parker." Another client, Lebanese and French, reached out asking for a name that could work across multiple cultures. The winning suggestion was "Chloe."
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  Geraldino: Ooh, I like that.
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  [SHUMITA CHUCKLES]
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  Geraldino, Narrating: So this woman, the baby-namer, she's just not throwing names at babies randomly. As "The New Yorker" reports, she mines film credits, checks street signs, and even researches naming trends. Oh, and she also goes through the Social Security Database to see which names are on the downslide. Think "Siri" and "Alexa". And for this service, parents are paying her anywhere from one to ten thousand dollars.
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  Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
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  Geraldino: And when you're in the app, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News+ partners.
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  Basu: We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
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