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The NY times recently ran a story about Jared Kushner paying no, or almost no taxes after showing a loss by using some legal, but creative accounting around depreciation. I've heard the same thing about owners of sports teams.

So, when it comes to the 1% it can be hard to measure who's actually in it.

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Asset depreciation is at best a temporary game - for example I racked up depreciation on a rental property, and during the years I did so, I paid less in taxes. When I sold the property I had to account for that depreciation and pay taxes on all of it.

There is a big difference between cherry picked examples and what happens on average.

We’ve all heard of millionaires paying no taxes, yet the top 0.1% pay an effective rate of 36% on average (too lazy to look up source again).

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