Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) pressed a group of cryptocurrency companies and professionals on Monday to justify their use of a tax break meant to uplift low-income neighborhoods, which HuffPost revealed is instead being used by wealthy crypto investors to skirt taxes with questionable benefits for the local community. The tax incentive, created by Republicans’ signature 2017 tax legislation, offers a significant reduction in capital gains taxes to wealthy investors and companies in exchange for building housing or businesses in low-income neighborhoods designated by the federal government as “opportunity zones.” The program was created with bipartisan support. But it has come under fire as a government boondoggle after evidence emerged that billions in tax breaks have gone to projects like luxury housing , high-end hotels, and self-storage units. Now, Wyden is demanding details from a cryptocurrency mining company, a data-center company that leases space to cryptominers, and an accountant with several crypto clients using the opportunity zone program.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Finance Committee chair is asking questions after a HuffPost report that crypto millionaires were taking advantage of the “opportunity zone” tax break intended to help poor neighborhoods.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[293,54,27,42,43],"class_list":["post-227309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-congress-courts","tag-crypto","tag-economy","tag-politics","tag-u-s-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}