The GOP’s tax plan fails to fix the underlying problems of inequality and lack of transparency.

As treasure troves of the super-elite’s untold trillions glisten in offshore tax havens, Main Street is sinking. Drowning in debt, clinging to the tatters of the welfare state, the gulf between the richest few and the rest of us could now widen even further with a new GOP tax bill loaded with another corporate bounty of loopholes, more tax “incentives,” and more trickle-up economics designed to concentrate as much wealth in as few hands as possible.

According to a report on the country’s widening wealth gap, published by the Program on Inequality at the Institute for Policy Studies, the elites at the helm of this upside-down economy would fit in a cozy lifeboat: The three wealthiest people in the United States – Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett – now own more wealth than the entire bottom half of the American population combined, a total of 160 million people or 63 million households.

More than half of U.S. wealth is controlled by 25 billionaires. And worldwide multinational corporations shield an estimated 10 percent of global GDP from taxation in obscure, unregulated financial enclaves.

It’s no secret that wealthy individuals and corporations channel their enormous financial assets into tax havens. Yet for the most part the piracy of the gilded class is perfectly legal, even encouraged, under existing tax codes. The everyday struggle to stay housed, get an education, and pay for medicine often traps working-class households in virtual debtor’s prisons. Today the bottom 1 percent of households are collectively $196 billion in the hole, while the top 1 percent sit on $33.4 trillion of combined net worth.

The GOP’s proposed tax bill purports to curb offshoring. But advocates point to the fine print: Various exemptions would severely limit the amount of corporate profit that is actually captured. A measure to nominally tax “excess” profits sets a sharp threshold at revenues above $100 million. The framework is structured so that, as economist Kimberly Clausing of Reed College notes, “Embedded in that tax is actually an incentive to move tangible assets offshore.”

That means American workers get hit on both ends: hemorrhaging public revenue, and seeing jobs slip away as multinationals are encouraged to invest abroad.

The structural problem that must be fixed, advocates say, is to provide basic transparency in the taxation system, so policy-makers and the public can at least track what’s happened to the estimated $94 billion to $131 billion in revenue that multinationals funnel away from public coffers into a financial black hole each year.

Of course, if they fully disclosed offshore tax holdings, that would defeat the purpose of the tax haven system. Who knows what else people would start to demand if politicians and billionaire CEOs were forced to come clean about the real sources of their riches? People might start to question whether they can be trusted to run our economies, and our governments.

MICHELLE CHEN is a contributing writer at The Nation.