Who’s left to pick up the slack when America’s richest take advantage of loopholes in the tax system?
It’s the average American.
“It’s just so riddled with loopholes,” Madoff said. “When I started teaching 32 years ago, the estate tax had been regularly kept up. [But] over the years, there were a lot of political changes. It took me a while to realize that the government stopped doing anything to keep this tax up.”
In her recent book The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy, Ray Madoff details the unseen ways in which the richest Americans exploit cracks in the income, payroll, gift, and estate tax systems.
The result, she says, is compounded wealth for the nation’s richest.
It was this recognition, combined with a growing exasperation over the current state of public awareness, that led Madoff to put pen to paper.
“I was frustrated because I felt like a lot of the conversation was based on false assumptions about what the current rules really were and how they really operated,” Madoff said.
According to Madoff, public discourse has turned toward wealth taxes and more progressive tax rates for the one percent as a solution to the country’s growing economic inequality crisis. But Madoff says this approach misses the heart of the problem.
Madoff proposes a different solution: streamlining existing taxes. She calls for the doing away of the estate tax and a wider-reaching income tax that would include investments and inheritance. It would be, in essence, a single tax imposed on everyone.
Implementing this solution starts with alerting the public to this tax injustice, according to Madoff.
“We need to make the system more coherent to the public,” Madoff said.
This is exactly why she has taken measures to ensure The Second Estate is not only informative, but accessible to all audiences.
Aziz Rana, colleague of Madoff and BC Law professor, sees this as one of the book’s greatest successes.
“One of the truly impressive achievements of the book is its ability to give a comprehensive account of how we got to where we are, in a way that makes clear to the engaged reader exactly what the policy and moral failures are and what a pathway out might be,” Rana said.
The Second Estate does away with the nuanced jargon typically found in academic writing. Instead, Madoff prioritizes making the complex subject matter accessible to all.
“Because why not?” Madoff asks. “You can still make as technical a point as you want while reaching the general public.”
Madoff’s welcoming writing style is paralleled in her own life, according to Rana.
“She is a deeply generous person and is committed to listening,” Rana said. “It’s one of the things that really makes her distinctive, this combination of scholarly rigor and gifted capacity of communication.”
Close friend and fellow BC Law professor Sharon Beckman says it’s her friend’s curiosity and compassion that make Madoff a standout teacher and author.
“She’s an incredible mentor, and that’s because her concern for her students is really genuine,” Beckman said. “I think you see this in the book too. She’s really genuinely concerned about the tax code, the way it’s subsidizing the rich at the expense of ordinary wage earners.”
Beckman saw The Second Estate at every stage of development, from early brainstorming sessions to the final pages pressed between a glossy cover.
“The book is written in a way that makes everything accessible,” Beckman said. “Even though it’s about such a serious topic, it’s very entertaining. She’s covering a lot of ground and doing it in a way that keeps your attention.”
Featuring everything from U.S. and European history Crash Courses, quotable lines from the sitcom Friends, excerpts from literary fiction, and quips from comedian and BC alumnus comedian Gary Gulman, The Second Estate has something for everyone, according to Madoff. This approach was intentional.
“I knew I wanted to get a message out there,” Madoff said. “What took me a while was to realize I needed to tell stories.”
Madoff’s target audience has not been the academics or economists one might expect.
“I’m trying to have conversations with people who are not tax people,” Madoff said. “I want to get the message out that this [book] is really just for regular people.”
To raise awareness about the wealthiest Americans’ extortion of the current tax system, as outlined in The Second Estate, Madoff has embarked on a whirlwind publicity circuit.
National Public Radio’s All Things Considered segment, various newspaper interviews, podcast Slate Money, and Center for Brooklyn History’s lecture series, are just a few notches on her public-appearance belt.
And Madoff’s efforts are paying off.
Madoff’s interview for New Economic Thinking has garnered more than 700,000 views. On Facebook, that same interview has surpassed one million views.
“I’m very much hoping that The Second Estate becomes shorthand for the problems of today,” Madoff said.
The system may be hard to understand, but it doesn’t have to be that way, Madoff said.
“Taxes are not too hard to understand,” Madoff said. “We are being duped by the current system. But it can be fixed.”