Evan Osnos

And why?

The answer, as you can imagine, has a lot of factors.

But the key one really at the heart of it is that we've changed the rules over the last century to make it much easier for big fortunes to grow, mostly by reducing the taxes that would chip away at them over time.

So by one measure.

The average tax rate for the top, let's say, 400 richest Americans is now about half of what it was 50 years ago.

While the tax rates for the bottom 90% of Americans have really not budged much at all.

The answer is that wealth, as we all know, can buy you political access.

And political access means that you're able to then...

influence, compel, maybe even coerce political decision makers, people in Congress, people elsewhere in the government who have tremendous power, to make the rules better for you.

So I'll give you an example.

I mean, take something like the estate tax, which used to apply to a huge number of Americans.

It meant that at the time that you died, you were not able to pass along all of your inheritance to your kids without them paying a lot of it in taxes.

But over the course of the last generation or two, we've systematically pared back the estate tax to the point that a relatively small number of Americans now pay it.

Meaning, as one of the advisors to Donald Trump in his first administration, Gary Cohn, he was quoted as telling a member of Congress, quote, only morons pay the estate tax.

What he meant was they've created so many loopholes now that it's very easy by moving your money to one place or another to avoid paying the kinds of taxes that were intended to make sure that it didn't just concentrate over time in the hands of a very small number of people, but was in fact available for public usage so that you can build roads and schools and other public purposes.

Yeah.

And so there's become a kind of arms race among wealthy Americans and tax advisors about how to figure out all of the possible ways of avoiding taxes.

And so it's produced a toolbox that is frankly available to people who have the money to spend on the most advanced esoteric tax advice.

Well, it's become much more visible in our lives.

It used to be that there was an expression that went around among the very wealthiest advisors to the rich, which was that the whale that never surfaces doesn't get harpooned.