Make Them Pay - by Jesse Eisinger & Paul Kiel (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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 leaked tax returns of America's wealthiest people.

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.

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. 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.

Review Quotes

Praise for The Chickenshit Club

Winner of the 2018 Excellence in Financial Journalism Award

"Brave and elegant . . . A fearless reporter . . . Eisinger's important and profound book takes no prisoners." --The Washington Post

"An absorbing financial history, a monumental work of journalism . . . A first-rate study of the federal bureaucracy. It's also an expansive parable: of righteousness and compromise, overreach and underreach, excess, deceit, greed--the whole American show." --Bloomberg Businessweek

"That the Wall Street titans who blew up the financial system suffered little more than slight reductions in their bonuses only reinforced the perception that the 'system' is 'rigged'--with the consequences we know only too well. Many people simply want to live in a world that is fair. As Eisinger shows, this one isn't." --James Kwak, The New York Times Book Review

"The book is as alarming as it is comprehensive, but it's also gripping. The unfolding of the financial crisis makes for thrilling drama in Eisinger's hands, heightened by the anxiety still felt by all who survived it. He's even able to make white-collar courtroom proceedings and investigations into tax shelters sparkle. . . . This book is a wakeup call, delivered calmly yet with no shortage of well-reasoned urgency, to a nation whose democratic traditions are being undermined by backroom dealing, deregulation, and the consolidation of corporate power. It's a chilling read, and a needed one." --NPR

"Smart, deeply sourced, and full of insider tidbits about legal stars like Comey, judge Jed Rakoff, and former SEC chair Mary Jo White." --Fortune

"A well-reported tale." --The Financial Times

"Jesse Eisinger is a master journalist. Revelatory, maddening, and engrossing, the book draws on vivid characters and immersive narratives to chart the rise of the corruption and the inertia within the Justice Department." --Bryan Burrough, co-author of Barbarians at the Gate and author of Days of Rage

"Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eisinger does a masterful job of assembling this riveting dossier of the legal scholars, jurists, and elected officials who played a role in turning the U.S. into a nation in which white-collar criminals are celebrated for their cunning instead of incarcerated for their offenses." --Booklist (starred review)

"The Chickenshit Club is a fast moving, fly on the wall, disheartening look at the deterioration of the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, written sympathetically, thoroughly, but mostly--engagingly. It is a book of superheroes." --The San Francisco Review of Books

About the Author

Jesse Eisinger is an assistant managing editor at ProPublica. He is the author of The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives. In 2011, he and a colleague won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for a series of stories on questionable Wall Street practices that helped make the financial crisis the worst since the Great Depression. He was the lead reporter on the Secret IRS Files series that exposed the tax avoidance strategies of the ultrawealthy. The series won several prizes, including the Selden Ring in 2022. He also won the 2015 Gerald Loeb Award for commentary. He was the editor on the Friends of the Court series, which revealed how a small group of politically influential billionaires wooed justices with lavish gifts and travel; it won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2024. He was a consultant on the HBO series Succession. Before joining ProPublica, he was the Wall Street editor of Condé Nast Portfolio and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, covering markets and finance. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the journalist Sarah Ellison, and their daughters.

Paul Kiel covers business for ProPublica. He has won numerous awards, including the Selden Ring Award, a Gerald Loeb Award, a Barlett & Steele Award, a Scripps Howard Award twice, a Hillman Prize, and a Philip Meyer Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors. His work has appeared in several newspapers, including The Washington Post and The New York Times. He has also produced stories for NPR and American Public Media's Marketplace, and has appeared on This American Life.