You can frequently avoid paying taxes, but only at the cost of paying more money than your taxes would have been. It is usually preferable to pay the taxes instead.
> That’s in significant measure because she was able to transform money her company was compelled to spend cleaning up the oil spill into a perfectly legal nine-figure tax write-off for herself.
OP's post was essentially a re-wording of this quotation, and as such, doesn't make a case beyond I guess an implied "that's legal so it's good, or at least just the way it has to work".
That is the most interesting aspect of these articles. They are optimised for the title, not the content. Ignore the oil spill: if you lose $100m, you won't pay tax on that..."Billionaire pays no tax" is a better headline than "Billionaire loses lots of money". If you think that a wealth tax is a good idea, fine just say that...don't bother with the article. But the reason most journalists don't write about wealth taxes is because they lack the actual knowledge to understand why we don't have wealth taxes, they just write misleading bullshit about income taxes instead.
This isn't just splitting hairs either. There is enough real information on inequality in the US (this is something that most journalists are very clever about...this is an article about inequality because journalists know that the target audience will interpret it that way). You don't need the bullshit articles. These articles misinform the public, they don't need to be written.
- the mechanism for the tax write-off, by paying costs for cleanup rather than a fine
- how wealthy the players involved really are
- another mechanism for avoiding tax (transferal of property to a spouse on death avoids capital gains -- I'm not really interested in this one, but the article goes into it)
- yet another mechanism (possibly unilaterally inflating company valuation after the transferal, then selling "for a loss" that perhaps is illegitimate -- remember the damaged rig was not part of the sale)
- how sole-proprietership means the first write-off is a personal tax write-off too (I have no real objection to this)
- how the company has dragged its feet tremendously in actually doing the cleanup (ample detail in the article)
- how the estimate on the extent of the spill was perhaps 20 times too small (according to a government law suit)
- how the Coast Guard had to hire its own contractor to finally install the protective dome
The article definitely has some "look how wealthy these people are, they're not like us" aspects to it, especially in the first quarter or so, but the substance of it is about the triangulation of fire to "push for settlement with a trust for costs (tax write-off), push for that settlement to be based on an estimate that underestimates the true cost, push back on doing any of the actual work". (That being said, and maybe I missed it, but I don't think the article does a good job of explaining how that last part improves their bottom line -- do they get to recoup unspent funds from the trust?)
But I don't see how you're getting to (paraphrasing) "just say you want a wealth tax, instead of this misleading bullshit". Seems like a reasonably good article on "doing bad things and largely getting away with it".
And yes, your response is the kind of misconception that I think the journalists banked on.