Low-income Americans are no longer the only ones living paycheck to paycheck. High-income earners have a hard time balancing the family books, too.

According to a recent LendingClub report, as of August, 45% of Americans who make six figures are living paycheck to paycheck, up from 38% a year ago.

The Internal Revenue Service is receiving $80 billion from the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act, sparking concerns that the tax collection agency will use the injection of cash to expand audits on Americans making less than $400,000.

The Biden administration vows that will not happen.

And Treasury Department officials insist they have a plan for going after wealthy tax cheats while keeping their promise not to expand the likelihood of auditing folks at lower income levels.

They did it: Senate Democrats have finally passed a reconciliation package after more than a year of negotiations. Gone are one-time priorities like child care and housing; Americans will have to settle for the country’s largest ever investment in fighting climate change, plus some important strides toward lowering health care costs.

So now Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter.

It wasn’t enough to loudly criticize the platform — on the platform — for not adhering to his personal standards.

It wasn’t enough to secretively buy a 9.2 percent stake in the social media company, becoming its largest individual shareholder. It wasn’t enough to accept an offer to join the company’s board (which provoked huge internal outcry from the company’s employees). It wasn’t even enough of a power trip for him to then reject that offer five days later.

At the start of the pandemic, COVID-19 was often depicted as an agent of random chaos, a disease that affected everyone irrespective of their race, gender, or socioeconomic status. On virtually every count, this assumption has proved to be false. Although the coronavirus managed to disrupt how human beings live and work, it didn’t do so proportionally. The crisis hit an unequal world and, when it did, exacerbated those inequalities.

After the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig exploded in 2010, environmentalists surveying the damage in the Gulf of Mexico came upon a mystery. The water had oil slicks that, because of the currents, couldn’t have originated from the site of the notorious accident.

Here’s a tale of two Stephen Rosses.

Real life Stephen Ross, who founded Related Companies, a global firm best known for developing the Time Warner Center and Hudson Yards in Manhattan, was a massive winner between 2008 and 2017. He became the second-wealthiest real estate titan in America, almost doubling his net worth over those years, according to Forbes Magazine’s annual list, by adding $3 billion to his fortune. His assets included a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park and the Miami Dolphins football team.

It’s well known, at least among tax lawyers and accountants for the ultrawealthy: The estate tax can be easily avoided by exploiting a loophole unwittingly created by Congress three decades ago. By using special trusts, a rarefied group of Americans has taken advantage of this loophole, reducing government revenues and fueling inequality.

The wealthiest Americans may be dodging as much as $163 billion in income taxes every year, according to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and many leverage tax laws to do it legally, financial experts say.

Although U.S. levies increase with income, the ultra-wealthy often finesse the tax code to reduce how much they owe. And some billionaires, such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, pay little to no taxes compared to their wealth, a ProPublica report found. 

As Congress wrangles over the details of a massive spending bill that's central to President Joe Biden's "Build Back Better" plan, a new analysis shows the proposal will leave America poorer in the long run.