By coincidence there was a lengthy article in the NYT just yesterday addressing the topic of tax fairness. What follows are excerpts from an interview Ezra Klein did with Ray Madoff, a professor at Boston College Law School who specializes in tax law and estate planning. She’s the author of “The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy.” It begins with her answering a question about widely circulated myths regarding how people at different levels of income, and wealth, are taxed.
Let’s start with the 40 percent of nonpayers. You might have heard this in terms of Mitt Romney’s talking about the 47 percent — which is what it was when he was running for office. The thing that he didn’t account for is the tremendous burden imposed by payroll taxes. And even though 40 percent of Americans don’t pay any federal income taxes, they still pay significant payroll taxes.
Indeed, today I just read a statistic that 80 percent of Americans pay more in payroll taxes than they pay in income taxes. And these can be quite burdensome. Because unlike income taxes, they start at $1.
So it was wrong and misleading in terms of the nonpayers. But where it’s particularly misleading is when it comes to this top 1 percent. We see this all the time, whenever there are movements to impose more taxes on the wealthy. The stories start popping up in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Economist — those are just in the past couple of months. They all say: What are you talking about? The top 1 percent are already paying 40 percent of the income taxes.
And what this isn’t capturing is that statistic is referring to the top 1 percent of income earners. Those with the most income. High-income lawyers, doctors, finance people — they indeed are paying a significant chunk of the income taxes.
However, when it comes to the wealthiest Americans — Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, Larry Ellison, all the people we hear about so often — they are just as likely to be in the 40 percent of nonpayers as they are in the top 1 percent of payers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-ray-madoff.html
How is that possible? Because the uber rich get their wealth by virtue of the increasing value of the stock they own. Bezos, for example, has never taken a salary in excess of $82K. That amount is what he pays state and federal income taxes on. The money he uses to live his wealthy lifestyle with is money borrowed against the value of his stock. His can actually deduct the interest payments on that borrowed money. So his billions in wealth are not taxed.
Google, Charles Littlejohn. He released information about high wealth individuals and was sent to prison for it.
https://www.taxnotes.com/featured-analysis/littlejohns-unjust-tax-sentence/2024/05/17/7jhtz
His investigation found that.........
Warren Buffett had what they call a true tax rate of 0.1 percent; Jeff Bezos had 0.98 percent; Michael Bloomberg had 1.3 percent.