Book of the Week — The Triumph of Injustice -How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay

Any democracy must debate the proper size of government and the ideal degree of tax progressivity. Informed by history and international experience, by statistics and abstract reasoning, it is natural for individuals and countries alike to sometimes change views. But have the tax policy changes of the last decades been the result of such an informed deliberation? Has the collapse in taxes for the ultra-rich reflected what Americans as a society wanted?

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The first contribution of this book is to tell the story of this great transformation. Our story is not one of Left versus Right. It is not about the triumph of small-government conservatives over spread-the-wealth liberals. It is the story of how the tax system established by the New Deal was undermined. At each step of its demise, we find the same pattern. It starts with an outburst of tax avoidance. It continues with policymakers letting this tax avoidance fester, paralyzed by supposedly invincible foes — tax shelters, globalization, tax havens, financial opacity. And it ends with governments slashing the tax rates of the wealthy under the pretense that taxing the richest among us had become impossible.

Saez, Emmanuel and Gabriel Zucman “The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay”

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