In 2004, Hurricane Ivan tore through the Gulf of Mexico. One of the worst disasters wrought by Ivan’s wrath was damage to an offshore oil rig, owned by Louisiana-based company Taylor Energy, which fell over—uncapping the well beneath. Crude oil began to fill the Gulf. Taylor Energy first lied and said that only a few gallons of oil were leaking every day out of the broken well, while they worked to plug the holes created by Ivan and their rig. It wasn’t until 2008 that Taylor Energy Company admitted that at least 90 gallons of oil had been leaking per day. This admission came along with a $666 million deal with the government to put that money into a trust in order to clean up a four-year-running spill. By 2018, it turned out that not only was the spill not contained, but the amount of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico for the past 14 years was also considerably more than what Taylor pretended it to be—potentially hundreds if not thousands of times more. To date, it is the longest-running (and potentially the largest) oil spill in U.S. history. On Thursday, ProPublica published a report about the billionaire owner of Taylor energy Company, Phyllis Taylor. The report highlights how ultra-wealthy Americans and their businesses pay nothing (or next to nothing) in taxes by using tax loopholes and the like. Ms. Taylor, according to the investigation, pulled in about $444 million in personal income between 2005 and 2018 while the Gulf of Mexico was being drowned in her company’s environmental disaster. Want to guess how much the 80-year-old Louisiana billionaire paid in taxes on that money? Read more