Yikes – an entire book on taxes! This was really a well-written book, focused on educating the reader and offering some potentially ominous tidings for the future of the USA. Time to invest in guillotines?
Considering the topic it was remarkably easy to read, and the author was kind enough to provide real-life examples at just the right times. But it was also being constantly sort of shocked about what people with wealth can get away with, and shocking what people without let them do.
Thanks to this book I could really understand the difference between earning money and having money – and this difference is huge when it comes to the US tax code. The tax-avoidance strategy of the wealthy (buy/borrow/die) nicely sums up some rather complex and unintuitive truths that allow the wealthy to become more so.
Wisely the author put most of the long history of tax code avoidance in the middle rather than leading us through it in the beginning. Still, that part was a little hard to get through, as it seemed to me like water under the bridge and fodder for only the morbidly curious.
I’m glad I read this book – especially contrasting it with the tax system of Japan. And I suppose we’ll see how far the current system in America can limp along before something drastic occurs.
Next I am reading Delancey by Molly Wizenberg.
