Business Insider Article Rating

Patagonia founder's big donation potentially saves him over $1 billion in taxes -- and shows how the wealthy aren't subject to the same rules as the rest of us

Sep 17, 2022 View Original Article
  • Bias Rating

    -48% Medium Liberal

  • Reliability

    N/AN/A

  • Policy Leaning

    10% Center

  • Politician Portrayal

    20% Negative

Bias Score Analysis

The A.I. bias rating includes policy and politician portrayal leanings based on the author’s tone found in the article using machine learning. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral.

Sentiments

Overall Sentiment

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  •   Conservative
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Bias Meter

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Bias Meter

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

52% : Bloomberg estimates that the capital gains tax on the donation could have come in at more than $700 million.
51% : "The argument for a change in tax policy to implement a gift tax for 501(c)(4)s is that not only can an individual donate unlimited -- they can continue to grow tax free for generations," Miller said.
46% : Completely free of taxes and all used for political purposes.
45% : But Chouinard's donations illustrate how the ultra-wealthy, even when championing big causes, fall out of the realm of taxation, which means that the public purse -- the one that pays for roads and airports and healthcare subsidies -- could be deprived of around a billion dollars in tax revenue, in Patagonia's case.
43% : "Regardless of how generous the donor is, they shouldn't be able to entirely opt out of taxes.
43% : When it comes to why Chouinard isn't paying much in taxes, "there's a simple legal answer -- because he does not need to," Steve Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, told Insider.
41% : What wasn't heralded so loudly: He could be avoiding more than a billion dollars in taxes while doing so.
39% : A Patagonia spokesperson told Insider the Chouinard family did not ask to create a company structure to avoid taxes.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.

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