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Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System
David Cay Johnston
*Perfectly Legal* is investigative reporter David Cay Johnston's exposé of how the American tax system, in his telling, quietly tilts to benefit the very wealthy and large corporations at the expense of everyone else. Drawing on his Pulitzer-winning tax coverage for *The New York Times*, Johnston walks readers through the loopholes, shelters, and enforcement gaps—much of it, as the title insists, entirely legal—that shift the burden onto ordinary wage earners. He argues that this is less a story of individual villains than of a system reshaped by lobbying and political choice. Written for a general audience with a reporter's eye for the telling case, it became an influential, much-debated account of American inequality in the early 2000s.
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The author
David Cay Johnston (b. 1948) is an American investigative journalist who covered tax and economic policy for The New York Times and won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting for his tax coverage. He has written several books extending the argument, including Free Lunch and The Fine Print, and teaches and comments widely on tax law.
The book
Perfectly Legal assembles case after case to show how the tax code's complexity and selective enforcement advantage those who can afford sophisticated advice, from deferred executive pay to offshore structures, while the IRS is starved of resources to police them.
How it has aged
The book's core diagnosis—rising inequality abetted by tax policy and weak enforcement—anticipated debates that only intensified afterward. Critics from the right dispute Johnston's framing and some of his emphases, and specific figures date quickly as laws change, but his reporting is well sourced and the broad picture has held up in later scholarship on inequality.
For more context
Read alongside Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman's The Triumph of Injustice and Johnston's own follow-up, Free Lunch.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- David Cay Johnston
- Publisher
- Portfolio (Penguin)
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 2003
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Essays
- Location
- Colorado
Places