On Dec. 29, the New York Times ran “For the Wealthiest, a Private Tax System That Saves Them Billions” by Noam Scheiber and Patricia Cohen. The article’s blurb was: “The very richest are able to quietly shape tax policy that will allow them to shield billions in income.” Is that a fact? Doesn’t Congress have something to say about “tax policy”? Also, the “very richest” have been saddled at times with personal income tax rates of over 90 percent. Scheiber and Cohen focus on the top 400 income earners in 2012, “the last year for which final data is available.” According to the IRS tables the article links to, there were 144,928,472 income tax returns filed in 2012. So the top 400 are one in every 362,321 personal income tax filers, or 0.000276 percent of the total, or 2.76 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent. You’ll get a shade over 400 by multiplying the number of returns filed in 2012 by 0.00000276....(Read Full Article)