Ray D. Madoff
Ray D. Madoff is a professor at Boston College Law School and the cofounder and director of the Boston College Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good. She is the author of Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead and lead author of The Practical Guide to Estate Planning. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Review of Books, among other outlets.
Ray D. Madoff’s A revelatory book, The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy, lifts the curtain on America’s most consequential public deception: how the rich get richer using tools the government gave them. She offers an unprecedented look behind the scenes of America’s byzantine system of taxation, laying bare not only its capacity to consolidate wealth but also the mechanisms by which it has created two fundamentally separate American societies: the working Americans who pay and the ultra-rich who benefit.
Amid conflicting narratives about the drivers of wealth and inequality in the United States, one constant hovers in the background: the US tax code. Through the strategic avoidance of traditional income, leveraging of investments and debt, and exploitation of rules designed to promote charitable giving, America’s wealthy do more than just pay less than their share; they remove themselves from the tax system entirely. Wealth becomes its own sovereign state, and the living is surprisingly―and maddeningly―cheap.