How the Richest People in America Avoid Paying Taxes
28th August 2025
The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.
According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the richest of rich Americans pay an average tax rate of 34 percent, higher than any other cohort’s. In reality, as everyone has long known, they pay less than that. A new study by some of the country’s most preeminent economists has finally put concrete numbers to the disparity. The average rate that the richest Americans pay, they find, sits at just 24 percent. That number has fallen markedly in recent years and will remain low for the foreseeable future, thanks to Donald Trump.
Think about that. A quarter of someone’s income is taken from them BY FORCE so that government bureaucrats can waste it. Yet the author of this article doesn’t even blink at it; he’s more focused on being one of the crabs in the bucket bringing potential escapees back into the muck.
The new study is a technical feat, combining data on corporate earnings, private wealth, and individual tax payments. And it confirms that the country’s tax code is regressive, not progressive, at the very top. Every year, America’s richest citizens paper over their earnings with losses and use other creative accounting strategies to shelter their fortunes, as the tax code allows them to do. As a result, the country’s billionaires pay lower tax rates than many of its millionaires do. Indeed, they pay lower tax rates than many middle-class professionals.
Why this comes as a surprise comes as a surprise. The reason billionaires pay lower tax rates than many middle-class professionals is clear to anybody who looks at the tax tables: Middle-class professionals pay tax on wage income, which is rapidly regressive and tops out at 37%, while billionaires pay tax (when they pay tax) on capital gains and dividends, which top out at 20%. This doesn’t take any ‘creative accounting’ at all, just enough brains to perform some elementary optimization. This is the reason Warren Buffet pays tax at a lower rate then his secretary, which all of the hand-wringers and finger-pointers are either too stupid to find out or too evil to bother to mention.
The study, by the UC Berkeley economists Akcan Balkir, Emmanuel Saez, Danny Yagan, and Gabriel Zucman, examines the wealth of Americans on the Forbes 400—not the 1 percent or even 0.01 percent, but the 0.0002 percent, a group including Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Trump himself. As of this year, these individuals have a minimum net worth of $3.3 billion.
And are therefore the verbal whipping-boys of mere small-change millionaires like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Whenever a Democrat says “TAX THE RICH!” they mean “TAX THOSE RICHER THAN ME!”.