How Goldman Sachs’s “tax-loss harvesting” lets the ultra-rich rake in billions tax-free

“Generating a tax loss without a substantial change in the investment.”

Tomorrow (Apr 25) I’ll be in San Diego for the launch of my new novel, Red Team Blues, at 7PM at Mysterious Galaxy Books, hosted by Sarah Gailey. Please come and say hi!

With the IRS Files, Propublica ripped away the veil of performative complexity disguising the scams that the ultra-rich use to amass billions and billions (and billions and billions) of dollars, paying next to no tax, or even no tax at all. Each scam is its own little shell game, a set of semantic and accounting tricks used to gussy up otherwise banal rip-offs.

The finance sector has a cute name for this kind of complexity: MEGO, which stands for “my eyes glaze over.” If you’re trying to rip off a mark, you just pad out the prospectus, make it so thick they decide there must be something good in there, the same way that any pile of shit that’s sufficiently large must have a pony under it…somewhere.

Propublica’s writers haven’t merely confirmed just how little America’s oligarchs pay in tax — they’ve also de-MEGO-ized each of these scams, like the way that Peter Thiel used the Roth IRA — a tax-shelter for middle-class earners to help save…