Scores of people with enormous wealth are paying relatively little, if anything, in taxes. Billionaires — and those with fortunes that are merely in the hundreds of millions — can avoid taxes legally, using loopholes that are unavailable to the rest of us.
The income tax is for working people. So is the payroll tax — which wage earners and their employers pay into Social Security and Medicare, week after week. The payroll tax and the income tax corral nearly everybody who holds down a job. Then there are the superrich. They live by another set of rules. The wealthiest people in the United States pay taxes on a minuscule proportion of their income, and some avoid the income tax and payroll tax entirely, says Ray Madoff, an expert on taxes at Boston College Law School. Much of their staggering wealth — assets including cash, stock, bonds, gold, art collections, homes, yachts and every other valuable thing they have already accumulated — is barely taxed, she says. Professor Madoff has written a persuasive book, “The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy.” She says billionaires in the United States can be virtually exempt from taxes, like the French aristocracy before the revolution of 1789. The superrich don’t need to bother with paychecks or 401(k) withdrawals. There are much better ways for them to minimize taxes and, perhaps, avoid paying them entirely. *https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/business/billionaire-income-tax-loopholes.html <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/business/billionaire-income-tax-loopholes.html>* -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#41264): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/41264 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/118547070/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
