Noam Scheiber and Patricia Cohen, For the Wealthiest, a Private Tax System That Saves Them Billions. The New York Times, 29 December 2015. Part of a series entitled Buying Power: “Articles in this series examine America’s growing concentration of wealth and its consequences for government and politics…. The very richest are able to quietly shape tax policy that will allow them to shield billions in income…. With inequality at its highest levels in nearly a century and public debate rising over whether the government should respond to it through higher taxes on the wealthy, the very richest Americans have financed a sophisticated and astonishingly effective apparatus for shielding their fortunes. Some call it the “income defense industry,” consisting of a high-priced phalanx of lawyers, estate planners, lobbyists and anti-tax activists who exploit and defend a dizzying array of tax maneuvers, virtually none of them available to taxpayers of more modest means.”
Reimagining Journalism: The Story of the One Percent
Michael Massing, Reimagining Journalism: The Story of the One Percent. The New York Review of Books, 17 December 2015. “Inequality, the concentration of wealth, the one percent, the new Gilded Age—all became fixtures of national debate thanks in part to the [Occupy Wall Street] protesters who camped out in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan [in 2011]. Even the Republican presidential candidates have felt compelled to address the matter [in 2015 and 2016]. News organizations, meanwhile, have produced regular reports on the fortunes of the wealthy, the struggles of the middle class, and the travails of those left behind. Even amid the outpouring of coverage of rising income inequality, however, the richest Americans have remained largely hidden from view.” This is the first of two articles. The second is How to Cover the One Percent, published in The New York Review of Books on 14 January 2016.