Our Tax System Should Make You Furious

Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg and Warren Buffett are three of the richest people in the world, but they pay little in income tax relative to their wealth. In 2021, ProPublica published an investigation built on leaked tax documents that reveal what some of the richest Americans really pay — or don’t. Warren Buffett had a true tax rate of 0.1 percent. Jeff Bezos: 0.98 percent. Michael Bloomberg: 1.3 percent. Ultra-wealthy Americans have essentially been written out of the tax system. “It’s wrong as a matter of principle. It’s wrong because we need their money. It’s wrong as a matter of fairness. It is wrong for so many reasons,” the law professor Ray Madoff told me. She’s the author of the new book “The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy,” and she’s interested in helping people understand how broken the American tax system is and how to fix it. In this conversation, we discuss the techniques the ultra-wealthy use to evade the tax system, why they think “salaries are for suckers” and what tax reform could look like. Mentioned: “ The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax ” by Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernst…