By Mike Koetting June 9,2026
This post is the second of two on the American tax structure. The previous one focused on payroll taxes; today’s post addresses other taxes. Again, the material draws heavily from The Second Estate, a superb book by Ray Madoff, a law professor at Boston College. I highly recommend it if the topic interests you. It is short and a surprisingly easy read. An even shorter version of her thinking is available in an interview with Erza Klein. Today’s post is not trying to summarize what she said but to focus on the macro implications.
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The title of Ray Madoff’s book, The Second Estate, refers to the official distinctions in prerevolutionary France between the three strata of society—clergy, nobles and commoners. Members of the Second Estate, the nobility, enjoyed special privileges, which included freedom from taxes. She suggests that the wealthiest people in America have created a new form of the Second Estate.
It is common knowledge that today’s economy features an economic distribution as extreme, probably more extreme, than the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th Century. However, the difference between the top and the bottom is so large and the labels thrown around so much that it is easy to lose track of how great those differences are.
Continue reading “Taxes: The Elite Aren’t Paying Their Share”
