Wednesday, May 20, 2026

Our Tax System Should Make You Furious

“Wash the plate not because it is dirty nor because you are told to wash it, but because you love the person who will use it next.”

 -St. Teresa of Calcutta


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NY Times: Our Tax System Should Make You Furious

New York Times: Our Tax System Should Make You Furious, by Ezra Klein:

As you may know, April 15 was Tax Day here in the U.S. If you’re a regular American, you make money through wages, and it’s probably not your favorite day of the year. If you make a median income or above, you’re handing a lot of that money back to the government.

But that is a price we pay for living in a society, right?

Well, not for everyone. You may remember that in 2021, ProPublica published an investigation built on a bunch of leaked tax documents revealing what the richest Americans really pay — or don’t. Warren Buffett had a true tax rate of 0.1 percent; Jeff Bezos had 0.98 percent; Michael Bloomberg had 1.3 percent.

We know what they paid. So what is it they’re doing? How does it work? And what can we actually do about it?

Ray Madoff is 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[reviewed by David Cay Johnston here]. She knows how broken the tax system is — partially because she has helped the rich navigate it — and she has some ideas for how to fix it. …

 

Mehrotra Reviews Campbell’s “Taxation and Resentment”

Ajay K. Mehrotra (Northwestern) has published a Lawfare review essay on a new book by Andrea Louise Campbell (MIT Political Science), Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes (2025). From the review: 

Since the 1980s, tax cuts have been a cornerstone of national Republican economic policy. The 1970s property tax revolts began the obsession with limiting taxes, but the momentum continued well into the following decades and remains with us today. In recent years, the tax cuts fixation has even become bipartisan. National Democrats have surrendered in many ways to this policy preoccupation by limiting their commitments to increasing taxes to only those on the rich, or those who make more than $400,000 (or is it $250,000?). As a result, tax hikes have surpassed Social Security reform in modern American politics as the new “third rail” of domestic policy.

One of the great puzzles of the recent tax-cutting frenzy is why have so many everyday Americans agreed to this new policy prescription? Why aren’t the majority of taxpayers in favor of higher taxes on the rich? Why do they support limiting estate taxes, which affect only the wealthiest Americans, or cutting the corporate tax? Self-interest, after all, would suggest that the non-rich majority would favor higher taxes on the minority of uber-wealthy individuals and companies that have prospered in our New Gilded Age from growing inequality and greater concentrations of wealth.

In her fascinating new book, “Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes,” MIT political scientist Andrea Louise Campbell takes on that set of questions. More broadly, Campbell addresses the fundamental query: “Why is it so hard to raise taxes in the United States? Why is it so difficult to fund government?” As one of the country’s leading experts on public opinion and American politics, she naturally turns for answers to public attitudes toward taxes.

What she finds is surprising and counterintuitive. Unlike rich Americans who, Campbell argues, are well aware of their self-interest and thus have successfully waged a century-long war to reduce their taxes, the rest of us “non-rich,” in Campbell’s terminology, “have often been unwitting allies in the quest of the well-heeled to minimize their taxes.” She finds that many ordinary Americans have distinct tax preferences that counter their objective self-interest.

 

Amici Appointed in Trump v. IRS

In Tax Notes, Mary Katherine Browne reports as follows: 

Six private practice attorneys have been asked to weigh in on whether subject matter jurisdiction exists in a $10 billion lawsuit that would allow a court to adjudicate the president’s case against his own government.

In an April 29 order, Judge Kathleen M. Williams of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida asked attorneys from Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, Munger Tolles & Olson LLP, and Selendy Gay PLLC to serve as “friends of the court” and weigh in on whether the president’s lawsuit in Trump v. IRSmeets the case and controversy requirement under Article III.

Williams recently scheduled a May 27 hearing on the matter, expressing concern over whether the parties were sufficiently adverse to each other and noting that President Trump is a sitting president who controls the federal government. The government has yet to file an appearance or response to the president’s lawsuit and missed its April 20 deadline to answer the complaint.

Previous TaxProf Blog Coverage:



Initial Data on 2026 Tax Refunds

Max Rego, “How are Americans spending their tax refunds this year?” (The Hill, April 26, 2026), provides an overview of initial Treasury data: 

[T]he average tax refund this filing season was more than $3,400, an increase of 11 percent from last year. 

Treasury also said that more than 53 million filers utilized at least one of the provisions offered under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which President Trump signed into law last July.

More than 25 million filers, for instance, deducted their overtime pay — averaging out to more than $3,100 per filer. Under the law, individuals can deduct up to $12,500 of the “half” portion of their “time-and-a-half” overtime pay. 



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