How Do the Rich Keep Getting Tax Breaks?
A Q&A with David Wessel, author of “Only the Rich Can Play,” on how a tax credit to spur investment in distressed areas became a bonanza for the wealthy.
Sean Parker, the man behind the gold rush.
Photographer: Jemal Countess/Getty Images Europe
This is one of a series of interviews by Bloomberg Opinion columnists on how to solve the world’s most pressing policy challenges. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Alexis Leondis: You spent 30 years as a reporter, editor and columnist at the Wall Street Journal and now serve as senior fellow and director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution. In your new book, “Only the Rich Can Play: How Washington Works in the New Gilded Age,” you focus on a tax break, passed by Congress in 2017, that lets wealthy Americans defer or cut their capital gains tax bills by investing in what are supposed to be economically disadvantaged areas, or opportunity zones. What made you want to tell the story?