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President Franklin D. Roosevelt pounded on his desk and swore.
His treasury secretary had handed him a collection of memos detailing the various methods the rich have been avoiding taxes. Enraged by a wealthy businessman’s schemes, Roosevelt requested his treasury secretary to publicly denounce the person as a “son of a bitch.”
Roosevelt, himself an inheritor, earlier had warned that “financial royalists” had “carved dynasties” off the backs of America’s working women and men. Now he noticed an opportunity to handle the unfairness within the nation’s tax system.
“The time has come when we’ve got to battle again, and the one approach to battle again is to start to call names of those very rich people,” Roosevelt informed the treasury secretary, who detailed the Might 1937 scene in his diary.
That summer time, the Treasury Division launched one identify after one other at a packed assembly of a joint committee of the Home and Senate. Individuals noticed how most of the nation’s wealthiest households gamed the tax system with tips that Roosevelt described as “so widespread and so wonderful each of their boldness and their ingenuity that additional motion directly appears crucial.”
Some businessmen stashed their income in secret accounts within the Bahamas. Ethel Mars, the widow of candymaker Frank Mars, was singled out for equine tax avoidance. She deducted the losses from her Milky Method horse racing stables from the sweet producer’s company taxes.
The interior income commissioner testified that the late E.W. Scripps and his son, whose newspapers championed the working man, prevented an estimated half one million {dollars} in taxes (almost $10 million in immediately’s {dollars}) by directing revenue to holding firms — derided by the commissioner as “merely ephemeral subdivisions of the personalities of the person proprietor” — to benefit from decrease tax charges and deductions.
The starring villain in Roosevelt’s crackdown on aggressive tax avoidance was the Mellon household, which managed banks, aluminum manufacturing and oil pursuits.
Roosevelt summed up the stakes of this historic probe in a letter to Congress. “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society,” he wrote, invoking former Supreme Court docket Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He then added his personal knife twist: “Too many people, nevertheless, need the civilization at a reduction.”
Within the greater than eight many years for the reason that hearings, tax avoidance has hardened right into a lifestyle for the ultrarich. Over the previous 12 months, ProPublica has analyzed confidential IRS knowledge protecting 1000’s of the nation’s wealthiest folks and revealed the largely authorized methods they use to drastically winnow down their tax payments, typically to zero.
The Scripps, Mellon and Mars households live proof of the triumph of tax avoidance and the sturdiness of dynastic fortunes: Their mixed wealth immediately is pegged by Forbes at $114 billion. Over time, members of all three households have performed distinguished roles within the fashionable anti-tax motion and have helped form tax coverage. And in a centurylong cat-and-mouse recreation, Congress has scrambled to maintain up with their techniques.
Drawing on the trove of secret IRS knowledge in addition to letters, diaries, books, congressional data and court docket paperwork, ProPublica traced how these households managed to protect their wealth during the last century regardless of congressional efforts to clip dynastic fortunes.
With every new rewrite of the tax code, the superrich deploy intelligent trusts and armies of attorneys and lobbyists to search out methods to not pay. Even laws particularly designed to prune fortunes earlier than they move to the subsequent era has not been a lot of an obstacle.
Take the property tax, which was established in 1916, and has by no means fairly labored the best way Congress meant. Over time the charges have modified, however the objective of taxing the wealthiest Individuals has remained. This 12 months, the property tax applies to {couples} price greater than $23.4 million.
Confronted with taxes at loss of life, a few of the wealthy merely handed their fortunes to their heirs whereas they have been alive. So Congress enacted a tax on these items. Enterprising mother and father bought across the full chunk of property taxes by skipping their children and giving their wealth to their grandchildren. Then got here the 1976 tax imposed on items that skip a era. All through, the ultrarich have stayed one step forward.
The property tax has eroded to the purpose that final 12 months the estates of simply 1,275 folks in the entire nation owed the tax — down from a peak of 139,000 in 1976 — regardless of historic amassing of wealth by the very richest.
The property tax basically has change into voluntary for the ultrawealthy, paid provided that “you’re unwilling to take the time and pay attorneys to plan across the tax,” mentioned Alice Abreu, a tax legislation professor at Temple College.
Neither of the principle levers the federal government has to rein in dynastic wealth and inequality — revenue and property taxes — is working, she mentioned, noting that their failure additionally deepens racial divides as the fashionable aristocrats, like their forebears, are overwhelmingly white.
“The last word consequence,” Abreu mentioned, “is the very actual menace to democracy that we’re dealing with proper now.”
Worries about outsized wealth consolidated within the palms of some date again to the Founding Fathers. When he was a Virginia legislator, Thomas Jefferson sought authorized methods to forestall the perpetuation of nice fortunes, fearing the rise of American-style feudalism. An “aristocracy of wealth,” Jefferson warned in his memoir, posed extra “hurt and hazard, than profit, to society.”
Andrew Mellon, far left — a hater of the property tax — watches the signing of a package deal of tax cuts in 1926 by President Calvin Coolidge, whom he served as treasury secretary.
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Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG through Getty Photos
However all through historical past, the aristocracy has pushed again. Andrew Mellon, the banker and industrialist who served as treasury secretary underneath three Republican presidents and whom the Roosevelt administration pursued for tax evasion, argued towards wealth taxes to interrupt up giant fortunes. The continuation by way of generations of a single fortune “has been confirmed to be unimaginable,” Mellon wrote in his guide about taxation. “It’s an typically quoted saying that ‘there are three generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves.’”
The chorus meant {that a} fortune amassed by one era will likely be frittered away by the third. E.W. Scripps used the identical saying in his essays.
They have been fallacious. Only recently, one in every of Scripps’ great-great-grandsons posed on Instagram in shirtsleeves, holding stacks of money, his arm festooned with diamond-encrusted watches. Personal jets and a fleet of Lamborghinis ferry him between a mountain getaway in Aspen and a gun vary in Miami, the place he shoots a gold AK-47.
And this 12 months Mellon’s grandson, Timothy, donated $53 million price of securities to the state of Texas for a border wall with Mexico, The Texas Tribune reported. A railroad investor and main donor to Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection marketing campaign, Timothy Mellon wrote in his autobiography that huge authorities has made a report variety of Individuals depending on authorities largess. “They’ve change into slaves of a brand new Grasp, Uncle Sam,” he wrote.
The fortunes of Andrew Mellon and his friends have proved so sturdy over the previous century that immediately one-third of the highest 50 wealthiest Individuals on the Forbes checklist are heirs. The cascading riches have minted multimillionaires and billionaires exterior the highest 50, as nicely. ProPublica’s evaluation of confidential IRS knowledge reveals the youngest son of the late opioid magnate Mortimer Sackler took in additional than $205 million by age 22; Bruce Nordstrom, grandson of the division retailer founder, collected greater than $175 million in belief revenue by way of 2019; and William Wrigley Jr., the great-grandson of the chewing gum pioneer, raked in additional than $570 million in belief revenue by way of that 12 months.
Sackler, Nordstrom and Wrigley declined to remark. After repeated calls and emails, an government on the railroad firm the place Timothy Mellon is a significant investor mentioned she couldn’t attain Mellon and that he doesn’t usually touch upon media inquiries. A consultant of the Scripps household mentioned its members “have at all times complied with all tax legal guidelines.” Members of the family, he mentioned, “don’t try to control, affect or change tax insurance policies.”
A spokesperson for the Mars household mentioned that it “prides itself on being accountable Individuals” who “have at all times paid their taxes in full, together with on all revenue acquired from the corporate.”
At present, the nation’s richest make use of what are aptly often known as dynasty trusts, tax shelters designed to permit them to keep away from property taxes not only for three generations, however for the subsequent 1,000 years. And even endlessly.
To grasp the roots of America’s makes an attempt to rein in household fortunes, it helps to start out within the early 1900s with a whiskey-swilling, pistol-toting millionaire.
“Rascality of the wealthy man”
E.W. Scripps Fights for Taxes on the Wealthy, Then Regrets It
That millionaire was E.W. Scripps. A person of contradictions, he preached radicalism and expressed sympathy for the labor insurgents who bombed the Los Angeles Occasions constructing and killed 21 folks. He then spent a lot of his final decade crusing the world on his 172-foot yacht or puffing cigars at Miramar, his sprawling ranch exterior of San Diego modeled after a citadel in Italy.
Scripps
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Bettmann Archive/Getty Photos
Scripps co-founded a newspaper empire in 1878 aimed on the working class. Within the late 1800s, when many newspapers value 5 cents, Scripps bought his for a penny and printed information that, he mentioned, helped working women and men “defend themselves from the brutal power and chicanery of the ruling and using class.”
The technique made Scripps wealthy, and his writings present deep misgivings about his wealth. He feared his heirs may change into “unutterable snobs.” And he fearful that the laborers, incensed by the selfishness of America’s plutocrats, would stand up in a “violent, expensive, and maybe bloody revolution.”
Scripps wrote, “I didn’t rely myself a lot a pal of the poor as I counted myself the antagonist of the silly members of my very own financial class.”
He noticed the tax system as a approach to defuse that powder keg and took a number one function in campaigning for taxes that he mentioned would “make the wealthy males pay.”
As World Conflict I loomed, Scripps pressed President Woodrow Wilson: “I strongly urge that we must always pay as we go within the struggle with revenue and inheritance taxes,” Scripps informed Wilson in a telegram, including that individuals who made greater than $100,000 ($2.2 million in immediately’s {dollars}) ought to pay essentially the most. “Such laws would value me way more than half my current revenue.”
In 1916, Wilson signed laws creating the fashionable property tax. As it’s immediately, the property tax was based mostly on the worth of an individual’s property earlier than they have been handed to heirs. That first 12 months, the speed on wealth exceeding $5 million was 10%. The next 12 months, the highest price was 25% and shortly would soar to 40%.
But, from the earliest days of the revenue and property taxes, it was clear that the rich discovered methods to duck them. Scripps’ newspapers ran an investigative collection about tax dodging in 1916, and Scripps pressured Congress and the president to make revenue tax knowledge public. Complaining to Wilson, Scripps mentioned Treasury Division scrutiny of his personal taxes was so insufficient that he may have paid half of what he owed with out being found.
“The rascality of the wealthy man has been used to affect Congress to rig the tax legislation with purposeful defectiveness to offer loopholes for the rich,” Scripps informed one in every of his editors.
An investigation about tax dodging was featured on the entrance web page of The Toledo Information-Bee, a Scripps-owned newspaper, in 1916.
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The Toledo Information-Bee through Google Information Archive
His enthusiasm for progressive taxation, nevertheless, dimmed as his personal taxes rose. Scripps complained to President Warren G. Harding in 1921 that he’d seen his taxes rise nearly 30-fold — which he discovered “absurd” and “unreasonable.”
Even so, Scripps confessed to Harding that he had been profitable in avoiding taxes by preserving income inside his enterprise and, in consequence, would depart his heirs a a lot larger property. It wasn’t precisely tax evasion, Scripps mentioned, but it surely was avoidance.
The next 12 months, in 1922, Scripps put all of his newspaper inventory in a belief for his heirs together with his son Robert Paine Scripps as trustee.
By that time, trusts had already change into a most well-liked tax-dodging device of the wealthy, they usually have remained so. The belief is a authorized instrument so historical that students nonetheless debate its exact origins. Within the Center Ages in England, they have been utilized in half to get round a feudal type of taxation in addition to guidelines requiring the primary born son inherit a father’s property. With a belief, a landowner may move an inheritance to a spouse and youthful youngsters in addition to preclude any funds to the lord.
At present, there are a lot of sorts of trusts, from these created by cut-and-paste templates to bespoke variations crafted by boutique legislation companies devoted to the protection of household fortunes. At their most simple, they’re imaginary vaults for money, inventory, companies or different issues. The cash made by what’s within the belief — say, dividends, curiosity or enterprise income — remains to be topic to revenue tax. However it’s potential to arrange a belief in order that what’s inside is protected against the property tax. The one who units up the belief writes directions and designates folks often known as trustees to hold out these needs. That’s the place the paranormal energy of the belief is available in: Within the eyes of the property tax system, the one that created the vault and their heirs don’t really personal it. The wealth inside can exist in a limbo unreachable by the property tax as a result of the trustees technically management it. Nonetheless, the heirs can obtain a large stream of revenue from these shares or properties for generations.
Scripps’ belief was a bit of completely different. As a result of he wasn’t keen to surrender management of the shares in his belief throughout his lifetime, Scripps’ property would later face a tax invoice. However after his loss of life, it routinely reworked into the type that might enable generations of his heirs to keep away from the property tax that he had pushed to create.
Scripps, on a yacht, smokes a cigar and reads the newspaper. He spent the final years of his life crusing.
Credit score:
E.W. Scripps Archive through Ohio College Libraries
Scripps, whom one biographer known as a lifelong misogynist, additionally dictated that Robert’s feminine offspring have been to obtain half what the males did. He made positive his spouse and daughter wouldn’t get any shares in his newspaper firm. He wrote that he didn’t need them to show what he thought-about “an instrument of energy” into “merely an instrument to fabricate cash to spend on issues girls need.”
A Scripps household spokesman mentioned E.W. Scripps’ intention was to perpetuate and increase his firm and that “the longer term prospects of his newspapers have been way more essential than the monetary pursuits of his heirs.”
Scripps would later set sail on his yacht and die off the coast of Liberia with no household at his aspect. His belief lived on for 86 extra years.
“The Gates of Gold”
A Foe of Taxes on the Wealthy Takes Energy
On Inauguration morning in March of 1921, the brand new treasury secretary arrived in Washington aboard a non-public rail automobile. With a bearing the San Francisco Examiner known as “so shy that (it) is sort of shrinking,” Andrew Mellon lacked the swagger of probably the most highly effective businessmen on this planet.
At 65, Mellon was the oldest cupboard member of the Harding administration and by far the richest. “Be assured, neighbors, your cash is protected so long as your new Cousin Andrew of the drained eye stands guard on the gates of gold,” gushed a reporter for the Los Angeles Occasions.
Mellon got here by his early fortune and antipathy for taxes the old school means: He inherited them from his outdated man.
Thomas Mellon had immigrated from what’s now Northern Eire, the place, he complained in his autobiography, “oppressive taxes … drove our folks from their houses.” Within the early 1820s, Thomas, then a toddler, visited Pittsburgh. He gaped on the energy of a steam-driven grist mill and on the opulence of the mill homeowners’ house, a stately brick mansion. This was the Negley property, owned by probably the most distinguished landholders in Pittsburgh.
Mellon would stay on that very property. Years later, after a calculated courtship, he married Sarah Jane Negley, who inherited a share of her father’s properties. As Pittsburgh boomed, Mellon turned profitable in his personal proper, constructing a legislation profession, investing in actual property, turning into a choose after which an immensely rich banker. With success got here concern, a nagging sense that his riches could possibly be snatched away by the tax man, in line with a biography of Mellon by one in every of his great-great grandsons.
Andrew Mellon, as treasury secretary, lays cornerstone of the Inner Income constructing in Washington in Might 1929.
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Common Historical past Archive/Common Photos Group through Getty Photos
Steeped in social Darwinism, Mellon seen the acquisition of wealth as a mark of advantage and poverty as a failure of character. Mellon wrote in his autobiography that voting rights have been liable for lots of society’s ills, driving greater spending, borrowing and taxes. Not far under the floor of those fears was racism. After the Civil Conflict, Mellon toured the South, the place he wrote that he was disgusted to see Louisiana’s Legislature captured by what he known as “stolid, silly, impolite and awkward area negroes, lolling on the seats or crunching peanuts.” These representatives, he declared, have been puppets of white Northerners who have been utilizing “corrupt schemes to rob the property homeowners and taxpayers.”
In 1869, Mellon based a financial institution the place he was joined by two of his sons, Richard and Andrew. They have been early enterprise capitalists. Firms that borrowed cash from the Mellon financial institution — metal, oil, aluminum and chemical companies, amongst others — turned Mellon firms because the household took stakes in every. Thomas Mellon quickly started to switch his enterprise pursuits to his sons. In 1890, the Pittsburgh newspapers reported that Mellon had transferred his “huge estates,” together with 1,000 dwelling-houses in Pennsylvania, to Andrew.
By the point Thomas Mellon died in 1908, his youngsters have been being profitable hand over fist, and their political energy would quickly match their wealth.
Andrew Mellon purchased this Pittsburgh mansion in 1917.
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AP Photograph
In Andrew Mellon, Harding discovered an ideal individual to ship on the president’s promise of bringing a rustic exhausted by the privations of struggle “much less authorities in enterprise and extra enterprise in authorities.”
Mellon could be dogged by allegations that he used his perch to advance his household’s enterprises. However Harding — and the subsequent two presidents — didn’t care.
As David Cannadine would write in his biography of the treasury secretary, Mellon would later be beloved by conservatives as a prophet of “trickle-down” economics: Mellon argued that decreasing taxes for firms and the wealthiest would spur funding that might result in prosperity for the nation.
When he assumed his cupboard put up, the highest revenue tax bracket was 73%. Mellon argued that rich folks more and more noticed taxes as punitive and sought methods to keep away from them. “Taxes that are inherently extreme usually are not paid,” Mellon wrote in a guide on taxation printed whereas he was treasury secretary. He requested the Bureau of Inner Income, which he managed, to place collectively an inventory of authorized tax avoidance schemes. Later, Mellon admitted underneath oath to utilizing 5 of the ten tips to cut back his taxes.
Mellon particularly hated the property tax, which he sought to remove. “The social necessity for breaking apart giant fortunes on this nation doesn’t exist,” Mellon wrote in his guide. When lawmakers thought-about elevating the property tax on the wealthiest Individuals to 40%, Mellon decried the transfer to a Senate commitee as “financial suicide” and likened the actions of the senators to “the revolutionists of Russia.”
After Mellon was reappointed by the subsequent president, the press started describing him as “close to to being the monetary dictator of the US.”
However Mellon nonetheless needed to take care of Congress. And shortly he discovered himself grappling with a significant disaster.
“Dishonesty and Crime Thrive within the Darkish”
The Tax Funds of the Wealthy Change into Public
In late October of 1924 America’s richest and strongest males woke to see their revenue tax funds splashed throughout the entrance pages of newspapers, simply as E.W. Scripps had envisioned years earlier.
“The lid is off revenue tax secrets and techniques,” The Boston Globe declared.
Over Mellon’s objections, Congress had handed a present tax and the so-called publicity modification, which approved the discharge of the names of taxpayers and the quantity of revenue tax they paid.
The disclosures that adopted contained some bombshells: J.P. Morgan, who dominated the banking world, paid an revenue tax of simply $98,643, which was inexplicably 9 occasions lower than the junior accomplice at his agency. Oil magnate Harry Sinclair, who was embroiled within the Teapot Dome bribery scandal, paid simply $213.
However there was no approach to decide what their revenue was, which deductions they took or what loopholes they have been exploiting. Newspapers printed lengthy lists of names and quantities paid however have been unable to offer a lot context.
The New York Occasions reported revenue tax funds on the entrance web page.
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The New York Occasions
Nonetheless, as Duke Regulation professor Lawrence Zelenak not too long ago identified, journalists who dug into the numbers again then recognized a placing pattern: these with essentially the most cash didn’t essentially pay essentially the most revenue tax.
“Individuals supposed, or recognized to be among the many very wealthy, in some circumstances paid a smaller revenue tax than individuals supposed solely to be in snug circumstances,” The Wall Avenue Journal reported in 1924.
Wisconsin senator and progressive presidential candidate Robert “Preventing Bob” La Follette known as the low funds a scandal. “Tax paying is public enterprise, and public enterprise must be public,” he mentioned. “Dishonesty and crime thrive at midnight.”
Then got here the backlash. Although The New York Occasions printed the tax particulars on its entrance web page, its editorial board known as the legislation permitting publication of this knowledge “silly and even odious.”
Mellon, whose personal tax funds have been printed within the Scripps-owned Pittsburgh Press, mentioned the publication of tax funds was merely the “gratification of idle curiosity.”
The Division of Justice introduced fees towards the Baltimore Each day Publish, a Scripps paper, for publishing info from tax returns, and it additionally charged editors of a Kansas Metropolis newspaper. The legislation, the lawyer common’s workplace contended, made this info “open to inspection solely” and didn’t enable for publication. When decrease courts dominated in favor of the paper and editors, the solicitor common took the circumstances to the Supreme Court docket.
In 1925, the Supreme Court docket sided with the papers, discovering that every one types of publicity, together with publication in newspapers, have been allowed underneath the legislation.
That victory was short-lived. In 1926, Congress restricted the precise to examine the returns to its investigative committees. Beneath a brand new legislation, the data in tax returns solely turned public if the president ordered it so. Who did lawmakers put in control of writing the principles for such disclosure? Mellon.
For Mellon, although, there was a fair larger victory to be celebrated. Congress handed his tax plan, which dramatically lowered revenue tax and property tax charges and repealed the reward tax solely.
Andrew Mellon, left, together with his heirs: daughter, Ailsa, and son, Paul
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Bettmann Archive/Getty Photos
One senator complained that Mellon alone bought “a bigger private discount than the combination of virtually all of the taxpayers within the state of Nebraska.”
Within the 6 1/2 years earlier than the reward tax was reinstated, Mellon gave his two youngsters shares and properties, avoiding thousands and thousands in property taxes when he died. Mellon wrote to his son in 1931, “I’ve good precedent on this respect because it was the course adopted by my very own father.”
“I Am Not a Tax Dodger”
FDR and Congress Expose Tax Methods of the Wealthy
In November 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover in a landslide.
Now not did the nation view Mellon as Cousin Andrew guarding the gates of gold. By then, greater than 3,500 banks had failed. The unemployment price would quickly attain 25%. Individuals who misplaced their houses moved to “Hoovervilles,” shacks constructed from scrap wooden and steel. The Nice Despair had swallowed the nation.
Mellonism — and its central tenet of slashing taxes on the rich and enterprise to spur development — was in retreat. Earlier than Hoover left workplace, he and Congress reinstated the reward tax and hiked property and revenue taxes. At one level, the Home even tried to question Mellon, although that was dropped after Hoover named him ambassador to Nice Britain.
Roosevelt’s New Deal turned Mellon’s tax insurance policies the wrong way up. Beneath Roosevelt, whom one biographer hailed as a “traitor to his class,” the highest revenue tax charges shot as excessive as 94% to boost funds for World Conflict II. And the tax on the most important estates went as much as 77%.
In 1937 Roosevelt’s desk-thumping anger prompted Congress to disgrace members of the Mars, Scripps and Mellon households, in addition to many others. The chairman of the Joint Committee on Tax Evasion and Avoidance vowed “to unearth the varied gadgets and subterfuges employed by tax dodgers.”
The Washington Publish set the scene. “The sector was freshly sprinkled with sawdust yesterday to catch the heads of the victims, the guillotine was oiled to flashing perfection,” the reporter wrote, after which referred to Roosevelt’s treasury secretary as “the lord excessive executioner.”
Millionaires reacted with fury.
Ethel Mars posing with a jockey. Her household’s sweet firm deducted losses from her horse racing stables from its company taxes.
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Bettmann Archive/Getty Photos
“I’m not a tax dodger, by no means have been, and don’t intend to be,” declared Ethel Mars, who was reeling from the Treasury Division’s accusations that her household’s sweet firm had used her horse racing stables and farm as “type of a company passion.” By claiming the Milky Method horse farm was an promoting automobile, her household’s firm was capable of take a deduction of $288,477 (almost $6 million in immediately’s {dollars}).
And after chastising E.W. Scripps Co. and Scripps’ son for utilizing the holding firm scheme to dodge taxes, Congress clamped down on that maneuver.
However as tax historian Joseph Thorndike famous in his guide, “Their Honest Share: Taxing the Wealthy within the Age of FDR,” the Roosevelt administration’s pursuit of Mellon was extra private. He’d escaped impeachment underneath Hoover, however Roosevelt wasn’t going to let him get away.
First, the Division of Justice sought legal tax fraud fees, however a grand jury voted to not indict Mellon. Then the administration fought him bitterly in civil court docket, searching for greater than $3 million in again taxes and penalties for fraud, a case that might canine Mellon by way of his dying days. Among the many extra damning proof the federal government offered: Mellon used his household’s interlocking webs of associated firms to promote his inventory at a loss when he wanted a tax write-off after which have one other arm purchase it again later.
At one level throughout that case, the federal government challenged deductions Mellon needed to take for work he mentioned he would donate to a museum. However the authorities regarded petty later when Mellon unveiled his plans to construct the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork, which he promised Roosevelt “will rank with the opposite nice galleries of the world.”
Months after Mellon’s loss of life, the Board of Tax Appeals cleared him of the fraud cost however discovered he did owe some again taxes and penalties. In 1938, his property paid $668,000 ($13 million immediately), a fraction of what the federal government initially sought. Between inventory he gave to his youngsters earlier than he died and his items of artwork and a museum to the federal government, there was little left to tax in Mellon’s property.
Andrew Mellon testifies at a listening to about his taxes in Pittsburgh on April 1, 1935, two years earlier than his loss of life.
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AP Photograph
Mellon’s brother, Richard, wasn’t so fortunate. He gave his two children $75 million in inventory not lengthy earlier than he died. That left a shrunken property that claimed to be price simply $11 million. Roosevelt’s tax collectors cried foul. They slapped Richard Mellon’s property with a large tax invoice. After a battle, the federal government prevailed and Mellon’s heirs in the end paid greater than $40 million in federal and state taxes, about $840 million in immediately’s {dollars}.
At the same time as the federal government was tangling with the household, Richard Mellon’s daughter, Sarah Mellon Scaife, was already attempting to keep away from an identical destiny. She tucked shares of Mellon household financial institution and coal firms right into a belief for her younger son, Richard Mellon Scaife. She would later put Mellon household shares of Gulf Oil in a belief for her grandchildren.
She was in good firm. Not lengthy after that, Ethel Mars’ stepson, Forrest Mars Sr., and his spouse, Audrey, created trusts for his or her children and in some unspecified time in the future deposited shares of the household sweet firm.
And as soon as E.W. Scripps’ son Robert paid his father’s $1.2 million federal property tax (about $19 million in immediately’s {dollars}), the belief would defend the household’s fortune for the subsequent generations. Like his father, Robert died on his yacht.
With the three households’ defenses towards the property tax in place, cash would pour out of these trusts for the heirs many years later.
The Mellon Household
Thomas Mellon: The patriarch and businessman
Andrew Mellon: Treasury secretary, son of Thomas Mellon
Richard Mellon: Enterprise accomplice, brother of Andrew Mellon
Sarah Mellon Scaife: Daughter of Richard Mellon
Richard Scaife: Newspaper proprietor, son of Sarah Mellon Scaife
Timothy Mellon: Railroad investor, grandson of Andrew Mellon
“Isn’t It Grand?”
A Mellon Inheritor Makes use of His Belief Fund for Anti-Tax Causes
Andrew Mellon had been useless for almost 40 years, however one in every of his chief antagonists wouldn’t let America neglect concerning the energy his household fortune nonetheless wielded on the expense of taxpayers. Within the Home all through the Sixties, Rep. Wright Patman, the Texas Democrat who had tried to question Mellon, hammered away at how the superrich have been utilizing personal foundations “as a loophole which allows them to keep away from federal property taxes and thus preserve their companies and huge fortunes intact.”
Patman believed that the rich have been siphoning property that in any other case would have been topic to the property tax and pouring them into tax-exempt foundations benefiting their area of interest causes.
Patman singled out a basis created by a descendant of the Mellon household for funding esoteric analysis moderately than causes that profit the broader public, together with the “origin and significance of the ornamental kinds of medieval tombstones in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
“If the Mellons are extra eager about medieval tombstones than in Pittsburgh poverty, and care to spend their cash learning Twelfth- and Thirteenth-century church development, that’s the Mellons’ affair,” Patman mentioned throughout a 1969 listening to. “Nonetheless, there isn’t any obligation upon both the Congress or the American citizenry to offer the Mellons tax-free {dollars} to finance their unique pursuits.”
Patman’s hearings led to main adjustments within the guidelines governing philanthropy.
Quickly Mellon cash was getting used not for esoterica however to attempt to remake the tax system.
Sarah Mellon Scaife’s son, Richard, tapped his belief cash to remodel himself into what The Washington Publish in late Nineteen Nineties known as “essentially the most beneficiant donor to conservative causes in American historical past.” The teams he funded grew into a few of the most ardent and efficient anti-tax organizations within the land, offering the Reagan revolution and the assault on the property tax with mental firepower.
Lengthy earlier than that, Scaife had lived the lifetime of a dilettante. Actual penguins roamed the grounds of one in every of his childhood houses. Native journalists handled the Mellon Scaifes like royalty, describing their appearances at polo matches, horse races and fox hunts at Rolling Rock, a Pennsylvania property that dated again to his great-grandfather Thomas Mellon.
Throughout what he described as his “reckless years,” Scaife bought kicked out of Yale. When he was in his early 20s, a jury awarded $105,000 (greater than $1 million in immediately’s {dollars}) to a household after he crashed into them, critically injuring a younger mom. As soon as he turned 25, the belief Sarah Mellon Scaife arrange for him in 1935 started showering him with money. (One in all his wives in a divorce submitting would later checklist his career as “beneficiary.”)
Richard Mellon Scaife in 1973
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AP Photograph
Scaife recalled in his memoir, a duplicate of which is saved on the Library of Congress, that he was by no means informed precisely why the trusts had been arrange however he at all times assumed his mom was searching for authorized tax avoidance in anticipation of the “confiscatory” tax insurance policies of the New Deal. “You’d must be in a coma to not hear the alarm bell like that,” Scaife wrote. “The wealthy are going to prepare regardless of the legislation permits to make use of their cash as they see match, out of attain of the tax collector. That’s simply Economics 101.”
Two different trusts that his mom later arrange for him required that the revenue go to charity for a variety of years earlier than the cash flowed to her son. At one level, Scaife’s trusts had greater than $1.4 billion in them, in line with court docket data in one in every of his divorces.
“Isn’t it grand how the tax system is written?” Scaife wrote in his memoir.
When Scaife dipped his foot into nationwide politics, it backfired spectacularly. At a time earlier than political spending limits or donor disclosures, Scaife gave $1 million to the marketing campaign of Richard Nixon. To keep away from triggering the federal reward tax, Scaife wrote 334 checks for $3,000 or much less, every written to a distinct dummy committee that fronted for the marketing campaign, the Chicago Tribune reported.
After the Watergate scandal, Scaife largely shifted his donations away from particular person politicians to the unfold of conservative concepts, mentioned Yale Gutnick, Scaife’s longtime lawyer, in an interview.
Scaife gave a lot cash to the Heritage Basis, the influential anti-tax, limited-government suppose tank, that his identify in gold letters greets guests as they stroll by way of the door of its Washington workplaces. He would later fund conspiracy-fueled investigations of President Invoice Clinton.
“Presidents may encompass themselves with Secret Service brokers and phalanxes of attorneys and operatives, however Scaife proved how exhausting it was to defend towards limitless, untraceable spending by an opponent hiding behind nonprofit entrance teams,” the journalist Jane Mayer wrote in “Darkish Cash: The Hidden Historical past of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Proper.”
A Columbia Journalism Evaluate reporter described how when she requested Scaife why he funded conservative causes, he replied: “You fucking Communist cunt, get out of right here.” He additionally informed her she was ugly and had unhealthy tooth.
Scaife additionally used a lot of the cash he inherited to remodel a suburban newspaper into the Pittsburgh Tribune-Evaluate. His objective was to offer a “second voice” to counter what he perceived because the liberal media dominating that metropolis. At one level the Tribune-Evaluate’s editorial web page editor dubbed the property tax “freedom robbing” and “un-American.”
The inheritor to a different dynastic fortune — Nackey Scripps Loeb, a granddaughter of E.W. Scripps — co-owned and helped run probably the most influential right-wing newspapers within the nation, the Manchester Union Chief in New Hampshire. As a result of New Hampshire held the primary presidential main, the Union Chief had particular sway in elections, and it pressed Republican candidates to signal pledges that they’d not elevate taxes. Loeb wrote in an editorial, “It’s previous time for a taxpayer revolt to power the Congress and the White Home to cease taxing us increasingly more as a way to assist the monster that they’ve created in Washington.”
The Scripps Household
E.W. Scripps: Founding father of newspaper firm
Robert Paine Scripps: Son of E.W. Scripps
Nackey Scripps Loeb: Co-owner of Union Chief, daughter of Robert Paine Scripps
Sam and Max Logan: Nice-great-grandsons of E.W. Scripps
A Scripps household spokesman mentioned that Loeb’s views don’t characterize the broader Scripps clan, which is made up of almost 100 particular person households with completely different social and political viewpoints. “With respect, it’s fairly clear to us that you’re choosing details and anecdotes to disparage the Scripps household to advance your viewpoints on tax insurance policies,” the spokesman mentioned. (The Scripps Howard Basis, which is funded by E.W. Scripps Co. and family members, is a donor to ProPublica.)
Although Loeb’s and Scaife’s newspapers shared an animus for taxation, Scaife’s stood out for an additional cause. The Tribune-Evaluate was a cash loser, bleeding pink ink even throughout occasions when many papers loved fats revenue margins. “The revenue factor was not uppermost,” Scaife wrote in his memoir. “My prime motive as a writer was and is ideological.”
Bizarre Individuals can’t deduct what they spend on ardour tasks. However for Scaife, the newspaper’s awful funds created a windfall. As a result of the newspaper was a enterprise within the eyes of the tax code, its losses helped offset the thousands and thousands Scaife was receiving every year in belief revenue. In consequence, Scaife paid zero in federal revenue taxes in 4 of the final seven years of his life, in line with tax data in ProPublica’s trove.
Nonetheless, cash thrown off by his trusts supported the approach to life of a royal. He owned a DC-9 that flew him between his nation property exterior of Pittsburgh and his seaside escapes in Nantucket and Pebble Seaside. His Nineteenth-century silver-gilt dinner service alone was price greater than the typical house in Pittsburgh.
“Cash, Cash, Cash”
Dynasties Attempt to Kill the Property Tax for Good
The day after he signed historic tax-cut laws in June 2001, President George W. Bush stood on a makeshift stage surrounded by hay bales and American flags on a century-old household farm in central Iowa. With a shiny inexperienced John Deere mix behind him and a classic corn silo within the distance, the 1,300 acre setting was the proper combine of recent and historic, a postcard of the heartland.
Now not, Bush informed the applauding crowd, would hard-working households must promote their farms to pay their property tax invoice. The brand new legislation phased out the property tax over the subsequent decade, removing it solely (if momentarily) in 2010.
“The invoice we labored on and I signed acknowledged the significance of the household farmer in America,” Bush informed the gang.
President George W. Bush speaks at a household farm in Iowa on June 8, 2001.
Credit score:
Mike Theiler/Reuters
The notion that the property tax was killing household farms turned a robust weapon within the battle towards the tax. But, the identical 12 months that Bush touted his victory for household farms, David Cay Johnston of The New York Occasions reported on an unpublished IRS evaluation of property tax returns that discovered nearly no working farmers owed any property tax in any respect. A distinguished Iowa State College economist informed Johnston he regarded exhausting however had by no means discovered a farm misplaced to the property tax.
The farm homeowners extra prone to really feel the aid of Bush’s property tax cuts weren’t these planting corn and soybeans in Iowa. They have been the “gents farmers” of Virginia’s Piedmont area. There, descendants of Andrew Mellon and Frank Mars owned properties in a historic district that describes itself as a spot the place “former working farms turned gentry estates” and “horse breeding, racehorse coaching, and dressage workouts occurred, together with foxhunting by rich land homeowners.”
Bush’s motion was the fruits of a decadelong PR and lobbying marketing campaign by a coalition of rich households and enterprise teams that solid the “loss of life tax” as one in every of America’s nice evils with a ghoulish authorities pursuing lowly taxpayers into the grave to safe just a few further nickels. The coalition, which was funded partially by Mars Inc., succeeded with the assistance of “cash, cash, cash,” Yale professors Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro wrote in a guide concerning the lobbying marketing campaign.
Mars Inc. is among the many largest family-owned companies within the U.S. On the time of Bush’s announcement, Forbes pegged the wealth of Frank Mars’ three grandchildren at $27 billion. Jacqueline Mars, granddaughter of Frank and an award-winning proprietor of horses that compete in equestrian occasions, has acquired greater than $1 billion in belief revenue since 1999, in line with the tax knowledge ProPublica analyzed.
The Mars Household
Frank Mars: Founding father of the sweet firm
Ethel Mars: Frank Mars’ spouse, race horse fanatic
Forrest Mars Sr.: Son of Frank Mars, stepson of Ethel
Audrey Mars: Forrest Mars Sr.’s spouse
Jacqueline Mars: Daughter of Forrest and Audrey Mars
A spokesperson for the Mars household declined to reply detailed questions however mentioned that Mars Inc. has paid over $15 billion in company taxes over a decade and “regularly creates good jobs, treats its folks nicely, gives services and products folks depend on, and makes use of its dimension to enhance folks’s lives and the planet.”
The anti-estate tax coalition shifted consideration away from these most definitely to pay it — the likes of the billionaire Mars heirs — to household farmers. When the Heritage Basis, funded by Scaife, complained the tax had a “rapacious urge for food for family-owned companies,” the photographs that got here to thoughts have been farmers and mom-and-pop companies, not the multinational Mars Inc. The coalition additionally efficiently focused state-level property and inheritance taxes, with these taxes in the end disappearing in 33 states.
Ray Madoff, a tax legislation professor at Boston Faculty, mentioned she is amazed at how efficient the anti-estate tax marketing campaign has been. “Individuals gained’t know what century Abraham Lincoln lived in,” she mentioned, “and they’re going to know that the property tax is a double tax that hurts household farmers.”
The advocates of property tax repeal even managed to show a tax that overwhelmingly fell on white wealth into a problem of racial justice. Robert Johnson, the founding father of Black Leisure Tv and the nation’s first Black billionaire, turned probably the most distinguished backers of the trouble. In a full-page New York Occasions advert, Johnson and others mentioned that eliminating the property tax would “assist shut the hole on this nation between African American households and White households.”
In 2006, an economist estimated that simply 59 of 38 million Black Individuals would pay the property tax.
The Bush tax cuts phased out the property tax till it was gone in 2010, however the tax got here again the next 12 months. By then, although, rich households had a means round it that had the blessing of the federal tax court docket.
Years earlier, a member of Walmart’s Walton household had tried to move cash to her youngsters freed from reward or property taxes utilizing a belief construction that pushed the boundaries of what was allowed. The IRS despatched her a hefty tax invoice, and the dispute wound up in U.S. Tax Court docket, which dominated towards the IRS in 2000. The belief she used, the grantor retained annuity belief, or GRAT, morphed from unique estate-tax dodge to routine property planning for the rich.
Right here’s the way it works. The creator places shares or different property right into a GRAT, which pays again an equal quantity to what was put in, plus a modest quantity of curiosity. Any positive factors on the investments movement to the heirs freed from reward or property taxes. So if an individual places in $100 million price of inventory and its worth rises to $130 million, the heirs obtain about $30 million tax-free.
As ProPublica not too long ago reported, greater than half of the 100 richest Individuals have used GRATs and different such trusts to keep away from property and reward taxes. Jacqueline Mars had greater than 15 GRATs, the tax data present.
Whereas they’ve main federal tax implications, trusts are literally ruled by state legal guidelines. This jurisdictional distinction has additionally tilted within the ultrawealthy’s favor. Because the wealthy embraced trusts, states have furiously competed for his or her belief enterprise, realizing that white-collar jobs and costs would observe. States started removing a centuries-old authorized idea often known as the “rule towards perpetuities.” Beneath that rule, the creator of a belief needed to designate individuals who have been alive when the belief was fashioned (typically grandchildren or great-grandchildren). The belief needed to finish 21 years after the loss of life of the final of these folks.
As soon as that rule was gone, this meant a billionaire may tuck wealth right into a belief and create what College of Chicago legislation professor Daniel Hemel dubbed “a perpetual estate-tax-avoidance machine.”
That wasn’t potential when E.W. Scripps created his belief in 1922. After defending the household’s riches from property taxes for many years, the belief resulted in 2012. The imaginary vault opened, and cash and shares gushed out for his heirs.
An image posted by Max Logan on Instagram with the caption, “This week’s stick with it necessities.” Logan is E.W. Scripps’ great-great-grandson.
Credit score:
Screenshot through Instagram
At present, one in every of his nice nice grandsons, Sam Logan, is a character on the MTV actuality present “Siesta Key.” He additionally owns a hashish startup and commonly posts on Instagram deplaning from a non-public jet or lounging atop a Rolls Royce. (His brother and fellow inheritor, Max Logan, is the Lamborghini and watch fanatic; one red-gold-and-diamond Richard Mille timepiece he displayed on Instagram retails for $285,000.)
A spokesman for the brothers declined to remark. A separate spokesman for the remainder of the household mentioned the brothers are “uncommon exceptions to the low-profile tradition” of the Scripps household.
“Nearly all stay lives which are low-key, dignified and in line with the communities wherein they stay and work,” that spokesman mentioned.
One other great-great-grandchild of Scripps acquired greater than $210 million in revenue earlier than her Nineteenth birthday, the confidential tax data present.
Like the remainder of the household, her monetary affairs are organized by Miramar Providers. Named after E.W. Scripps’ California ranch, the outfit consists of tax attorneys, accountants and funding specialists dedicated to perpetuating the household’s fortune.
Since E.W. Scripps’ belief was gone, the heirs needed to fear about defending their newfound wealth for the subsequent era. Fortunate for them, GRATs have been straightforward to come back by: 9 members of the Scripps household collectively had greater than 125 of those trusts, the tax data present.
The nice-great-granddaughter alone had already used no less than 10 GRATs. And by the age of 17, she had her very personal dynasty belief. That’s that sort that may final for hundreds of years.
Of Sizzling Pockets and Horse Farms
The Wealthy Win Once more
Although he loathed taxes, Thomas Mellon, the progenitor of the Mellon fortune, made an unintentional case for the property tax when he fearful concerning the corrupting affect of inherited wealth. “The place a household has loved their profession of wealth and prosperity for a era or so,” he wrote in his autobiography, “we might anticipate ‘degenerate sons.’”
The very court docket system in Pittsburgh the place Mellon presided as choose turned the location of a public battle over Mellon household cash. Certainly, the six-year battle over Richard Mellon Scaife’s belief may have been ripped from the pages of Charles Dickens’ “Bleak Home.” Even the setting — Allegheny County Orphan’s Court docket — sounds Dickensian.
When Scaife died in 2014, his final will and testomony requested that his canines be taken care of however didn’t point out his grownup son or daughter. Not that they have been paupers. Court docket data present the belief that Sarah Mellon Scaife created only for them nonetheless had $660 million in it in 2020 after having spit out thousands and thousands to each of them for years.
They sued for extra.
A belief Scaife’s mom created for him would have handed to his youngsters routinely, however Scaife emptied it to fund his newspaper enterprise earlier than he died in 2014. One of many youngsters’s major arguments was that the trustees by no means ought to have allowed their father to expend the principal of a dynastic belief on a money-losing newspaper. Even after Scaife’s daughter died, the case plodded on. Finally Scaife’s property agreed to pay $200 million in a court docket settlement, with the lion’s share returning to the belief for Scaife’s son David and his youngsters, court docket data present.
David Scaife couldn’t be reached for remark. Attorneys who characterize him didn’t return calls or emails searching for his remark, nor did the pinnacle of his household basis.
Richard Mellon Scaife in 1997.
Credit score:
Tony Tye/Pittsburgh Publish-Gazette through AP Photograph
Regardless of the settlement and a hefty state inheritance tax invoice, there nonetheless was loads of cash for Scaife’s anti-tax causes. Even from the grave, Scaife’s hand continues to affect the controversy over how a lot America will tax the rich. He donated greater than $736 million to 2 charities, one in every of which has given thousands and thousands of {dollars} in recent times to the Heritage Basis, Tax Basis and FreedomWorks. A cartoon on FreedomWorks’ web site reveals the grim reaper, with an IRS briefcase in a single hand and a scythe within the different, stalking a businessman at a bus cease.
The property tax is now on life assist. Annual revenues from the property and reward taxes as a proportion of family wealth within the nation have fallen greater than 80% for the reason that early Seventies, in line with economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez.
Barring a significant shift in tax coverage, the variety of self-perpetuating Mars, Scripps or Mellon-style dynasties will seemingly multiply and acquire dominion over ever extra areas of American life. Even the humdrum corners of capitalism are spawning intergenerational windfalls. ProPublica’s tax knowledge reveals household fortunes flowing to heirs of the founders of Public Storage, Household Greenback and even the corporate behind the microwaveable turnovers often known as Sizzling Pockets.
For a quick second this fall, it regarded just like the tide may lastly flip towards the ultrarich. Dynastic wealth confronted an actual menace for the primary time in years. Congress was contemplating a particular tax on billionaires, and increasing the property tax and clamping down on the trusts that tremendous rich households use to keep away from the tax.
Elon Musk, then the world’s richest man, complained to his 61 million Twitter followers: “Finally, they run out of different folks’s cash after which they arrive for you.”
The Secret IRS Information: Trove of By no means-Earlier than-Seen Data Reveal How the Wealthiest Keep away from Revenue Tax
When You’re a Billionaire, Your Hobbies Can Slash Your Tax Invoice
Including ammunition to the controversy was the publication, as soon as once more, of the personal tax info of the wealthiest Individuals. ProPublica reported that Musk didn’t pay any revenue tax in a current 12 months. Financier George Soros paid zero federal revenue taxes three years operating. And Amazon’s Jeff Bezos reported so little revenue one 12 months that he certified for a kid tax credit score, the tax data present.
However they needn’t have fearful. The exact same teams that fought the property tax within the Nineteen Nineties had by no means disbanded. With names just like the Household Enterprise Property Tax Coalition, they mobilized to battle the proposals concentrating on dynastic wealth. An actual property firm employed a former prime aide to Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a vital swing vote on the invoice, to foyer towards the adjustments. And the outdated arguments have been dusted off. Onerous working households must promote their farms and companies.
Even the American Horse Council cantered in: horse farms could be paved over for Walmarts, a lobbyist warned.
Simply weeks after they have been launched, the tax proposals concentrating on dynastic wealth have been gone, as useless as a fox eviscerated by hounds.
How We Reported This Story
To hint the fortunes of three households over the previous century, reporters drew on court docket data, transcripts of congressional hearings, letters, memoirs, telegrams, contemporaneous newspaper accounts and greater than 70 books.
Vital to our analysis on the Scripps household have been the E.W. Scripps Papers on the Ohio College Libraries and the Patricia A. Schaelchlin/Scripps Household Analysis Assortment at Scripps Faculty. Three books have been useful in tracing particulars about Scripps and his newspaper chain: “The Astonishing Mr. Scripps: The Turbulent Lifetime of America’s Penny Press Lord” by Vance Trimble, “The Scripps Newspapers Go To Conflict, 1914-1918” by Dale Zacher and “E.W. Scripps and the Enterprise of Newspapers” by Gerald J. Baldasty.
The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum shared a duplicate of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s diary, wherein he recounted the administration’s marketing campaign towards tax avoidance. “Their Honest Share: Taxing the Wealthy within the Age of FDR” by Joseph Thorndike additionally supplied context.
We relied on books written by members of the Mellon household: Thomas Mellon’s autobiography, “Thomas Mellon and His Occasions,” Andrew Mellon’s “Taxation: The Individuals’s Enterprise” and Timothy Mellon’s “panam.captain.” A number of different books on the Mellon household have been sources, together with David Cannadine’s biography, “Mellon: An American Life,” and David Koskoff’s “The Mellons: The Chronicle of America’s Richest Household.”
Few copies of Richard Mellon Scaife’s memoir, “A Richly Conservative Life,” exist. The Library of Congress made theirs obtainable to us. “Darkish Cash: The Hidden Historical past of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Proper” by Jane Mayer match Scaife’s function of bankrolling conservative think-tanks right into a broader motion.
We drew insights on taxation from W. Elliot Brownlee’s “Federal Taxation in America: A Historical past,” “Dying by a Thousand Cuts: The Struggle over Taxing Inherited Wealth” by Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro, and “The Triumph of Injustice: How the Wealthy Dodge Taxes and Tips on how to Make Them Pay” by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.
Paul Kiel contributed reporting.
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