A political biography, probing the labyrinth of Alabama politics in an effort to discover what forces, other than his own, shaped Hugo Black and set him upon the road to the Court
 
Almost any Alabamian, white or black, unsophisticated or meagerly educated, can name one man who was a justice of the United States Supreme Court. That name may be spoken with praise or, more often, profanity, but Hugo La Fayette Black, who left Alabama for Washington in 1927, remained a presence of major, almost legendary, proportions in his native state of Alabama. He was an associate justice of the Supreme Court for so many years that most Alabamians were vague as to what he did before and how he got the job. But any gray-haired man of seventy or eighty on Twentieth Street in Birmingham will tell you quickly enough that Hugo Black, beginning in the now-dim era of the Coolidge administration,. was once United States senator.
 

A revelatory book that lifts the curtain on America’s most consequential public deception: how the rich get richer using tools the government gave them.

Amid conflicting narratives about the drivers of wealth and inequality in the United States, one constant hovers in the background: the US tax code. No political force has been more consequential—or more utterly opaque—than the 7,000-page document that details who pays what in American society and government. Most of us have a sense that it’s an unfair system. But does anyone know exactly how it’s unfair?

Legal scholar Ray D. Madoff knows. In The Second Estate, she offers an unprecedented look behind the scenes of America’s byzantine system of taxation, laying bare not only its capacity to consolidate wealth but also the mechanisms by which it has created two fundamentally separate American societies: the working Americans who pay and the ultra-rich who benefit.

This is not a story of offshore accounts or secret tax havens. In The Second Estate, Madoff shows that the US system itself has, over time, been stripped and reconstituted such that it now offers a series of secret paths, hidden in plain sight, for wealthy people in the know to avoid taxation altogether. Through the strategic avoidance of traditional income, leveraging of investments and debt, and exploitation of rules designed to promote charitable giving, America’s wealthy do more than just pay less than their share; they remove themselves from the tax system entirely. Wealth becomes its own sovereign state, and the living is surprisingly—and maddeningly—cheap.