The starring villain in Roosevelt’s crackdown on aggressive tax avoidance was the Mellon family, which controlled banks, aluminum production and oil interests.
Roosevelt summed up the stakes of this historic probe in a letter to Congress. “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society,” he wrote, invoking former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He then added his own knife twist: “Too many individuals, however, want the civilization at a discount.”
In the more than eight decades since the hearings, tax avoidance has hardened into a way of life for the ultrarich. Over the past year, ProPublica has analyzed confidential IRS data covering thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people and revealed the largely legal strategies they use to drastically winnow down their tax bills, sometimes to zero.
The Scripps, Mellon and Mars families are living proof of the triumph of tax avoidance and the durability of dynastic fortunes: Their combined wealth today is pegged by Forbes at $114 billion. Over the years, members of all three families have played prominent roles in the modern anti-tax movement and have helped shape tax policy. And in a centurylong cat-and-mouse game, Congress has scrambled to keep up with their tactics.
Drawing on the trove of secret IRS data as well as letters, diaries, books, congressional records and court documents, ProPublica traced how these families managed to preserve their wealth over the last century despite congressional efforts to clip dynastic fortunes.
With each new rewrite of the tax code, the superrich deploy clever trusts and armies of lawyers and lobbyists to find ways not to pay. Even legislation specifically designed to prune fortunes before they pass to the next generation has not been much of an impediment.
Take the estate tax, which was established in 1916, and has never quite worked the way Congress intended. Over the years the rates have changed, but the goal of taxing the wealthiest Americans has remained. This year, the estate tax applies to couples worth more than $23.4 million.
Faced with taxes at death, some of the rich simply passed their fortunes to their heirs while they were alive. So Congress enacted a tax on those gifts. Enterprising parents got around the full bite of estate taxes by skipping their kids and giving their wealth to their grandchildren. Then came the 1976 tax imposed on gifts that skip a generation. Throughout, the ultrarich have stayed one step ahead.