Infinite Loophole

I was familiar with the ideas this essay talks about but reading these lines particularly highlights why the whole rhetoric about getting the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes must seem very amusing to those who are meant to be "caught" in its dragnet. They can only be scornful of the masses and their cluelessness

Much of the debate around American tax policy focuses on the income-tax rate paid by the very wealthiest Americans. But the bulk of those people’s fortunes doesn’t qualify as income in the first place.

They and the rest of us don't live in the same universe. Its somewhat like Newtonian physics does not apply in their realm and yet they would have the masses believe that if we tried hard enough we could somehow make the laws of gravity work the same for them as it does for us. The author is spot on: 

The one guarantee of any tax regime is that, eventually, the rich and powerful will learn how to game it. In theory, a democratic system, operating on behalf of the majority, should be able to respond by making adjustments that force the rich to pay their fair share. But in a world where money readily translates to political power, voice, and influence, the superrich have virtually endless resources at their disposal to make sure that doesn’t happen. To make society more equal, you need to tax the rich. But to tax the rich, it helps for society to be more equal