There are plenty of ways in which members of the 1 percent are able to game the tax code to their advantage. But not many involve cows.
Thanks to a half-dozen heifers he keeps on his land, Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Florida, is a 1 percenter whose livestock helps him gain a tax benefit. As the Miami Herald reported, Nelson was able to save tens of thousands of dollars in property taxes due to the presence of a few cows on property that he owns. Nelson has banked millions of dollars selling parcels of the land, the whole time paying taxes that were far below what he should have paid (according to the market value of the land) because of farm tax credits he was able to claim after letting cows graze on his grass.
"I pay all the taxes owed on the pasture land,” Nelson has said, defending the tax break. But this doesn’t change the fact that the state lost needed revenue on tax breaks that were meant to aid family farmers, but instead went to land that is decidedly not a farm.
Nelson is far from the only wealthy landowner abusing tax breaks meant for farmers in order to gain a financial advantage.
Tom Cruise pays just $400 per year in property taxes on an $18 million estate in Colorado, because a few sheep graze there from time to time. In the same state, actress Goldie Hawn fought to have her land classified as farmland, which lets her pay less than $3,000 in property taxes on 34 acres. After having her land reclassified, Hawn received nearly $38,000 from her county government in refunds for previous tax overpayments.
Keep reading: AlterNet: Holy Cow! How Senators and Movie Stars Use Livestock to Game the Tax Code.
