CBH Talk | Ray Madoff and Avery Trufelman Discuss “The Second Estate”
No political force has shaped American life more profoundly—yet remained more impenetrable—than the 7,000-page U.S. tax code. We all sense the system is unfair, but few truly understand how. In The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy, legal scholar Ray Madoff reveals how our tax code has created two fundamentally separate Americas: the working people who pay taxes, and the ultra-wealthy who, through loopholes hiding in plain sight, avoid them almost entirely.
Join us for a conversation that demystifies how this system came to be—and what can be done to change it. Madoff will be in dialogue with acclaimed podcaster Avery Trufelman, who brings her signature clarity to a topic too often obscured but crucial to us all.
Participants
Ray D. Madoff is a professor at Boston College Law School and the cofounder and director of the Boston College Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good. She is the author of Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead and lead author of The Practical Guide to Estate Planning. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Review of Books, among other outlets.
Avery Trufelman is the host and producer of the podcast Articles of Interest, named one of the best podcasts of the year by The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and many others. She was named one of the 500 most important people by the trade journal Business of Fashion.
