Make Them Pay (A History of the American Struggle to Tax the Rich)

How did we end up with a system that allows billionaires to pay so little income tax? In Make Them Pay, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jesse Eisinger and his reporting partner Paul Kiel investigate the history of income tax avoidance and reveal how the system is abused today—based on the shocking tax returns of America’s wealthiest people leaked to ProPublica in 2021.

In late 2020, Jesse Eisinger received an anonymous message on Signal asking for his mailing address. A few days later, he received a mysterious thumb drive containing the private tax records of America’s wealthiest people, including Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, the Kochs, the Waltons, and more. It was one of the greatest troves of government information ever obtained by journalists. Personal tax information is one of the most guarded secrets in the entire government. No one in the history of the country, not even the highest-ranking government officials, had ever seen what Eisinger was seeing.

Eisinger enlisted his ProPublica reporting partner, Paul Kiel, and together they set out to tell the American public what the numbers meant. When considered against the almost inconceivable vastness of their wealth, the wealthiest Americans pay remarkably little tax. Some (Bezos, Musk, Bloomberg, Soros, and on) even paid zero. Nearly twenty billionaires had received COVID-19 stimulus checks, money meant to help the poor and middle class ride out the pandemic, because their tax returns had made them look like paupers.

How did we end up with a system that allows the ultra-wealthy to pay so little income tax? In Make Them Pay, Eisinger and Kiel reach back into the past to explain how we got here, zooming in on key moments, from the writing of the Constitution to the present, that shaped the trajectory of the system and made it possible for billionaires today to pay tax rates far lower than middle-income workers. The characters that emerge from this carefully selected history are varied. Politicians (founding fathers, presidents, and lawmakers) are a big part of the story, but just as important are business titans like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, Warren Buffett, and Larry Ellison. Accessible, engaging, and eye-opening, Make Them Pay reveals how we ended up with a broken tax code that forces an unnecessary squeeze on budgets for Social Security, infrastructure, education, and other priorities—and drives us further from the goal of an equitable society.