Inequality is worse than we know. The super-rich really do avoid a lot of taxes.
“As the New York Times’s blockbuster report on how President Trump managed to inherit $413 million in inflation-adjusted dollars without paying much in the way of gift or estate taxes shows, the super-rich tend to be even more super and rich than the tax returns that economists use to estimate inequality say they are. That isn’t to say that the uber-wealthy are all bending the law to the point of potentially breaking it, like the Trumps are alleged to have done — disguising gifts as ‘loans,’ inflating invoices to make other gifts look like business income, and assessing properties at wildly different values, sometimes within weeks of each other, to minimize their tax bill — but rather that there are plenty of other more and less legitimate ways for well-heeled individuals and companies to shield their money from Uncle Sam.”