This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

The idea that millions of dead Americans are receiving Social Security checks is shocking, and bolsters the argument that the federal bureaucracy needs radical change to combat waste and fraud. There’s one big problem: No evidence exists that it’s true.

Despite being told by agency staff last month that this claim has no basis in fact, Elon Musk and President Donald Trump have continued to use the talking point as a pretext to attack America’s highest-spending government program. Musk seems to have gotten this idea from a list of Social Security recipients who did not have a death date attached to their record. Agency employees reportedly explained to Musk’s DOGE team in February that the list of impossibly ancient individuals they found were not necessarily receiving benefits (the lack of death dates was related to an outdated system).

And yet, in his speech to Congress last week, Trump stated: “Believe it or not, government databases list 4.7 million Social Security members from people aged 100 to 109 years old.” He said the list includes “3.5 million people from ages 140 to 149,” among other 100-plus age ranges, and that “money is being paid to many of them, and we’re searching right now.” In an interview with Fox Business on Monday, Musk discussed the existence of “20 million people who are definitely dead, marked as alive” in the Social Security database. And DOGE has dispatched 10 employees to try to find evidence of the claims that dead Americans are receiving checks, according to documents filed in court on Wednesday.

Musk and Trump have long maintained that they do not plan to attack Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the major entitlement programs. But their repeated claims that rampant fraud exists within these entitlement systems undermine those assurances. In his Fox interview on Monday, Musk said, “Waste and fraud in entitlement spending—which is most of the federal spending, is entitlements—so that’s like the big one to eliminate. That’s the sort of half trillion, maybe $600, $700 billion a year.” Some observers interpreted this confusing sentence to mean that Musk wants to cut the entitlement programs themselves. But the Trump administration quickly downplayed Musk’s comments, insisting that the federal government will continue to protect such programs and suggesting that Musk had been talking about the need to eliminate fraud in the programs, not about axing them. “What kind of a person doesn’t support eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending?” the White House asked in a press release.

The White House’s question would be a lot easier to answer if Musk, who has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” wasn’t wildly overestimating the amount of fraud in entitlement programs. Musk is claiming waste in these programs on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, but a 2024 Social Security Administration report found that the agency lost closer to $70 billion total in improper payments from 2015 to 2022, which accounts for about 1 percent of Social Security payments. Leland Dudek, a mid-level civil servant elevated to temporarily lead Social Security after being put on administrative leave for sharing information with DOGE, pushed back last week on the idea that the agency is overrun with fraud and that dead people older than 100 are getting payments, ProPublica reported after obtaining a recording of a closed-door meeting. DOGE’s false claim about dead people receiving benefits “got in front of us,” one of Dudek’s deputies reportedly said, but “it’s a victory that you’re not seeing more [misinformation], because they are being educated.” (Dudek did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.)

Some 7 million Americans rely on Social Security benefits for more than 90 percent of their income, and 54 million individuals and their dependents receive retirement payments from the agency. Even if Musk doesn’t eliminate the agency, his tinkering could still affect all of those Americans’ lives. On Wednesday, DOGE dialed back its plans to cut off much of Social Security’s phone services (a commonly used alternative to its online programs, particularly for elderly and disabled Americans), though it still plans to restrict recipients’ ability to change bank-deposit information over the phone.

In recent weeks, confusion has rippled through the Social Security workforce and the public; many people drop off forms in person, but office closures could disrupt that. According to ProPublica, several IT contracts have been cut or scaled back, and several employees reported that their tech systems are crashing every day. Thousands of jobs are being cut, including in regional field offices, and the entire Social Security staff has been offered buyouts (today is the deadline for workers to take them). Martin O’Malley, a former commissioner of the agency, has warned that the workforce reductions that DOGE is seeking at Social Security could trigger “system collapse and an interruption of benefits” within the next one to three months.

In going anywhere near Social Security—in saying the agency’s name in the same sentence as the word eliminate—Musk is venturing further than any presidential administration has in recent decades. Entitlement benefits are extremely popular, and cutting the programs has long been a nonstarter. When George W. Bush raised the idea of partially privatizing entitlements in 2005, the proposal died before it could make it to a vote in the House or Senate.

The DOGE plan to cut $1 trillion in spending while leaving entitlements, which make up the bulk of the federal budget, alone always seemed implausible. In the November Wall Street Journal op-ed announcing the DOGE initiative, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (who is no longer part of DOGE) wrote that those who say “we can’t meaningfully close the federal deficit without taking aim at entitlement programs” are deflecting “attention from the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud and abuse” that “DOGE aims to address.” But until there’s clear evidence that this “magnitude” of fraud exists within Social Security, such claims enable Musk to poke at what was previously untouchable.

Related:

DOGE’s fuzzy math Is DOGE losing steam?

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Democrats have a man problem. There was a second name on Rubio’s target list. The crimson face of Canadian anger The GOP’s fears about Musk are growing.

Today’s News

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that Democrats will support a Republican-led short-term funding bill to help avoid a government shutdown. A federal judge ruled that probationary employees fired by 18 federal agencies must be temporarily rehired. Mark Carney was sworn in as Canada’s prime minister, succeeding Justin Trudeau as the Liberals’ leader.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: The Trump administration is embracing AI. “Work is being automated, people are losing their jobs, and it’s not at all clear that any of this will make the government more efficient,” Damon Beres writes. The Books Briefing: Half a decade on, we now have at least a small body of literary work that takes on COVID, Maya Chung writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by John Gall*

I’d Had Jobs Before, but None Like This

By Graydon Carter

I stayed with my aunt the first night and reported to the railroad’s headquarters at 7 o’clock the next morning with a duffel bag of my belongings: a few pairs of shorts, jeans, a jacket, a couple of shirts, a pair of Kodiak work boots, and some Richard Brautigan and Jack Kerouac books, acceptable reading matter for a pseudo-sophisticate of the time. The Symington Yard was one of the largest rail yards in the world. On some days, it held 7,000 boxcars. Half that many moved in and out on a single day. Like many other young men my age, I was slim, unmuscled, and soft. In the hall where they interviewed and inspected the candidates for line work, I blanched as I looked over a large poster that showed the outline of a male body and the prices the railroad paid if you lost a part of it. As I recall, legs brought you $750 apiece. Arms were $500. A foot brought a mere $250. In Canadian dollars.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The kind of thing dictators do Trump is unleashing a chaos economy. RFK Jr. has already broken his vaccine promise. The NIH’s grant terminations are “utter and complete chaos.” Netanyahu doesn’t want the truth to come out. Republicans tear down a Black Lives Matter mural.

Culture Break

Music Box Films

Watch. The film Eephus (in select theaters) is a “slow movie” in the best possible way, David Sims writes.

Read. Novels about women’s communities tend toward utopian coexistence or ruthless backbiting. The Unworthy does something more interesting, Hillary Kelly writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

When I served as counselor of the State Department, I advised the secretary of state about America’s wars with Iraqi insurgents, the Taliban, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and al-Qaeda. I spent a good deal of time visiting battlefields in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as shaping strategy in Washington. But when I left government service in 2009, I eagerly resumed work on a book that dealt with America’s most durable, and in many ways most effective and important, enemy: Canada.

So I feel both morally compelled and professionally qualified to examine the Trump administration’s interesting but far from original idea of absorbing that country into the union.

There are, as Donald Trump and Don Corleone might put it, two ways of doing this: the easy way and the hard way. The easy way would be if Canadians rose up en masse clamoring to join the United States. Even so, there would be awkwardness.

[Read: The angry Canadian]

Canada is slightly larger than America. That would mean that the “cherished 51st state,” as Trump calls it, would be lopsided in terms of territory. It would be 23 times larger than California, which would be fine for owning the libs, but it would also be 14 times larger than the Lone Star State, which would definitely cause some pursed lips and steely looks there. Messing with Texas is a bad idea.

The new state would be the largest in population too, with 40 million people—more than California by a hair, and considerably more than Texas, Florida, or New York. Its size would pose a whole bunch of problems for Trump: Canada is a much more left-wing country than the United States, and absorbing it could well revive the political fortunes of progressives. If its 10 provinces became 10 states instead of one, only three would probably vote for the GOP; the other seven would likely go for Democrats. That might mean adding six Republican senators and 14 Democrats. If Trump were impeached a third time, that might produce the supermajority required for conviction in the Senate.

But such political ramifications are purely academic considerations at the moment. Polling suggests that 85 to 90 percent of all Canadians cling to sovereignty. Having been denied the easy way of absorbing Canada, therefore, the United States might have to try the hard way, conquering the country and administering it as a territory until it is purged of Liberals, Conservatives, and whatever the Canadian equivalent of RINOs turns out to be.

Unfortunately, we have tried this before, with dismal results. In 1775, before the United States had even formally declared independence from Great Britain, it launched an invasion of Canada, hoping to make it the 14th colony. The psychological-warfare geniuses in Congress ordered that the local farmers and villagers be distributed pamphlets—translated into French—declaring, “You have been conquered into liberty,” an interesting way of putting it. Unfortunately, the Catholic farmers and villagers were largely illiterate, and their leaders, the gentry and parish priests who could read, were solidly on the side of the British against a bunch of invading Protestants.

There were moments of brilliant leadership in this invasion, particularly in a daring autumn march through Maine to the very walls of Quebec. There was also a great deal of poltroonery and bungling. The Americans had three talented generals. The first, Richard Montgomery, got killed in the opening assault on Quebec. The second, John Thomas, died of smallpox, along with many of his men. Inoculation was possible, but, like today’s vaccine skeptics, many thought it a bad idea. You can visit the capacious cemetery for the victims on Île aux Noix, now Fort Lennox, Canada.

The third general, the most talented of the lot, was Benedict Arnold, who held the expedition together even after suffering a grievous leg wound. Eventually, however, he grew disgusted with a Congress rather less craven and incompetent than its contemporary successor and became a traitor, accepting a commission as a brigadier general in the British army and fighting against American forces.

We tried again in 1812. Thomas Jefferson, the original Republican, described the acquisition of Canada as “a mere matter of marching.” This was incorrect. The United States launched eight or nine invasions of Canada during the War of 1812, winning only one fruitless battle. The rest of the time, it got walloped. For example, General William Hull, like other American commanders a superannuated veteran of the Revolution, ended up surrendering Detroit with 2,500 troops to a much smaller British and Indian force. Court-martialed for cowardice and neglect of duty in 1814, he was sentenced to death but pardoned.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is perhaps unfamiliar with the Battle of Chateaugay. The last three letters are, after all, gay, and as such, the battle has doubtless been expunged from Defense Department websites and databases, meeting the same fate as the Enola Gay. Still, it is instructive. An invading force of 2,600 American regulars encountered about 1,500 Canadian militia members, volunteers, and Mohawks under a Francophone colonel, Charles de Salaberry.  They were defeated and had to withdraw.

Since the War of 1812, Americans have not tried any formal invasions of Canada, but there was tacit and sometimes overt support for the 1837–38 revolt of the Canadian patriotes, a confrontation over Oregon (a sober look at the size of the Royal Navy dissuaded us from trying anything), and the Fenian raids of 1866 and 1870. The Fenians were rather like the Proud Boys, only better organized and all Irish, and they also ended up fleeing back over the border.

Perhaps today’s Canadians are a flimsier lot. The Canadian armed forces are quite small (the army numbers only about 42,000, including reservists), although spirited and hardy. One should note with respect that 158 Canadians were killed fighting alongside American soldiers in Afghanistan. But even if the Canadian military were overcome after some initial bloody battles, what then?

Canadians may have gone in for wokeness in recent years, it is true, but there is the matter of their bloody-minded DNA. It was not that long ago that they harvested baby seals—the ones with the big, sad, adorable brown eyes—with short iron clubs. They love hockey, a sport that would have pleased the emperors and blood-crazed plebeians and patricians of ancient Rome if they could only have figured out how to build an ice rink in the Colosseum.

[Read: Canada is taking Trump seriously and personally]

Parenthetically, there remains the problem of the First Nations (as the Canadians refer to them), whom they treated somewhat less badly than Americans treated Native Americans (as we refer to them). There are about 50,000 Mohawks straddling the U.S.-Canadian border, and they are fearless, which is why you will find them building skyscrapers at terrifying heights above the street. As members of what used to be the Iroquois Confederacy, they were ferocious warriors, and they retain a martial tradition. It is sobering to consider that they may think, with reason, that we are the illegal immigrants who have ruined the country, and therefore hold a grudge.

There is a martial spirit up north waiting to be reawakened. Members of the Trump administration may not have heard of Vimy Ridge, Dieppe, the crossing of the Sangro, Juno Beach, or the Battle of the Scheldt. Take it from a military historian: The Canadian soldiers were formidable, as were the sailors who escorted convoys across the North Atlantic and the airmen who flew in the Battle of Britain and the air war over Germany. Canada’s 44,000 dead represented a higher percentage of the population than America’s losses in the Second World War. Those who served were almost entirely volunteers.

Bottom line: It is not a good idea to invade Canada. I recommend that in order to avoid the Trump administration becoming even more of a laughingstock, Secretary Hegseth find, read, and distribute to the White House a good account of the Battle of Chateau***. It could help avoid embarrassment.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is a near-perfect predator. In 1882, Robert Koch, the physician who discovered the microbe, told a room full of scientists that it caused one in seven of all deaths. In 2023, after a brief hiatus, tuberculosis regained from COVID its status as the world’s deadliest infectious disease—a title it has held for most of what we know of human history.

Some people die of TB when their lungs collapse or fill with fluid. For others, scarring leaves so little healthy lung tissue that breathing becomes impossible. Or the infection spreads to the brain or the spinal column, or they suffer a sudden, uncontrollable hemorrhage. Lack of appetite and extreme abdominal pain can fuel weight loss so severe that it whittles away muscle and bone. This is why TB was widely known as “consumption” until the 20th century—it seemed to be a disease that consumed the very body, shrinking and shriveling it. On a trip to Sierra Leone in 2019, I met a boy named Henry Reider, whose mix of shyness and enthusiasm for connection reminded me of my own son. I thought he was perhaps 9 years old. His doctors later told me that he was in fact 17, his body stunted by a combination of malnutrition and tuberculosis.

The cure for TB—roughly half a year on antibiotics—has existed since the 1950s, and works for most patients. Yet, in the decades since, more than 100 million people have died of tuberculosis because the drugs are not widely available in many parts of the world. The most proximate cause of contemporary tuberculosis deaths is not M. tuberculosis, but Homo sapiens. Now, as the Trump administration decimates foreign-aid programs, the U.S. is both making survival less likely for people with TB and risking the disease becoming far more treatment-resistant. After decades of improvement, we could return to something more like the world before the cure.

[Read: The danger of ignoring tuberculosis]

Anyone can get tuberculosis—in fact, a quarter of all humans living now, including an estimated 13 million Americans, have been infected with the bacterium, which spreads through coughs, sneezes, and breaths. Most will only ever have a latent form of the infection, in which infection-fighting white blood cells envelop the bacteria so it cannot wreak havoc on the body. But in 5 to 10 percent of infections, the immune system can’t produce enough white blood cells to surround the invader. M. tuberculosis explodes outward, and active disease begins.

Certain triggers make the disease more likely to go from latent to active, including air pollution and an immune system weakened by malnutrition, stress, or diabetes. The disease spreads especially well along the trails that poverty has blazed for it: in crowded living and working conditions such as slums and poorly ventilated factories. Left untreated, most people who develop active TB will die of the disease.

In the early 1980s, physicians and activists in Africa and Asia began sounding the alarm about an explosion of young patients dying within weeks of being infected instead of years. Hours after entering the hospital, they were choking to death on their own blood. In 1985, physicians in Zaire and Zambia noted high rates of active tuberculosis among patients who had the emerging disease now known as HIV/AIDS. TB surged globally, including in the U.S. Deaths skyrocketed. From 1985 to 2005, roughly as many people died of tuberculosis as in World War I, and many of them also had HIV. In 2000, nearly a third of the 2.3 million people who died of tuberculosis were co-infected with HIV.

[Read: Tragedy would unfold if Trump cancels Bush’s AIDS program]

By the mid-1990s, antiretroviral cocktails made HIV a treatable and survivable disease in rich communities. While a person is taking these medications, their viral levels generally become so low as to be undetectable and untransmittable; if a person with HIV becomes sick with tuberculosis, the drugs increase their odds of survival dramatically. But rich countries largely refused to spend money on HIV and TB meds in low- and middle-income countries. They cited many reasons, including that patients couldn’t be trusted to take their medication on time, and that resources would be better spent on prevention and control. In 2001, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development had this to say when explaining to Congress why many Africans would not benefit from access to HIV medications: “People do not know what watches and clocks are. They do not use Western means for telling time. They use the sun. These drugs have to be administered during a certain sequence of time during the day and when you say take it at 10:00, people will say, ‘What do you mean by 10:00?’” A 2007 review of 58 studies on patient habits found that Africans were more likely to adhere to HIV treatment regimens than North Americans.

In the mid-2000s, programs such as PEPFAR and the Global Fund finally began distributing antiretroviral therapy to millions of people living with HIV in poor countries. PEPFAR, a U.S.-funded initiative, was especially successful, saving more than 25 million lives and preventing 7 million children from being born with HIV. These projects lowered deaths and infections while also strengthening health-care systems, allowing low-income countries to better respond to diseases as varied as malaria and diabetes. Millions of lives have been saved—and tuberculosis deaths among those living with HIV have declined dramatically in the decades since.

Still, tuberculosis is great at exploiting any advantage that humans hand it. During the coronavirus pandemic, disruptions to supply chains and TB-prevention programs led to an uptick in infections worldwide. Last year, the U.S. logged more cases of tuberculosis than it has in any year since the CDC began keeping count in the 1950s. Two people died. But in some ways, at the beginning of this year, the fight against tuberculosis had never looked more promising. High-quality vaccine candidates were in late-stage trials. In December, the World Health Organization made its first endorsement of a TB diagnostic test, and global health workers readied to deploy it.

[Read: America can’t just unpause USAID]

Now that progress is on the verge of being erased. Since Donald Trump has taken office, his administration has dismantled USAID, massively eliminating foreign-aid funding and programs. According to The New York Times, hundreds of thousands of sick patients have seen their access to medication and testing suddenly cut off. A memo released by a USAID official earlier this month estimated that cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis will rise by about 30 percent in the next few years, an unprecedented regression in the history of humankind’s fight against the disease. (The official was subsequently placed on administrative leave.) Research on tuberculosis tests and treatments has been terminated. Although the secretary of state and Elon Musk have assured the public that the new administration’s actions have not disrupted the distribution of life-saving medicine, that just isn’t true. A colleague in central Africa sent me a picture of TB drugs that the U.S. has already paid for sitting unused in a warehouse because of stop-work orders. (Neither the State Department nor DOGE employees responded to requests for comment.)

Last year, roughly half of all international donor funding for tuberculosis treatment came from the U.S. Now many programs are disappearing. In a recent survey on the impact of lost funding in 31 countries, one in four organizations providing TB care reported they have shut down entirely. About half have stopped screening for new cases of tuberculosis. The average untreated case of active tuberculosis will spread the infection to 10 to 15 people a year. Without treatment, or even a diagnosis, hundreds of thousands more people will die—and each of those deaths will be needless.

By revoking money from global-health efforts, the U.S. has created the conditions for the health of people around the world to deteriorate, which will give tuberculosis even more opportunities to kill. HIV clinics in many countries have started rationing pills as drug supplies run dangerously low, raising the specter of co-infection. Like HIV, insufficient nutrition weakens the immune system. It is the leading risk factor for tuberculosis. An estimated 1 million children with severe acute malnutrition will lose access to treatment because of the USAID cuts, and refugee camps across the world are slashing already meager food rations.

For billions of people, TB is already a nightmare disease, both because the bacterium is unusually powerful and because world leaders have done a poor job of distributing cures. And yet, to the extent that one hears about TB at all in the rich world, it’s usually in the context of a looming crisis: Given enough time, a strain of tuberculosis may evolve that is resistant to all available antibiotics, a superbug that is perhaps even more aggressive and deadly than previous iterations of the disease.

[Read: Resistance to the antibiotic of last resort is silently spreading]

The Trump administration’s current policies are making such a future more plausible. Even pausing TB treatment for a couple of weeks can give the bacterium a chance to evolve resistance. The world is ill-prepared to respond to drug-resistant TB, because we have shockingly few treatments for the world’s deadliest infectious disease. Between 1963 and 2012, scientists approved no new drugs to treat tuberculosis. Doing so stopped being profitable once the disease ceased to be a crisis in rich countries. Many strains of tuberculosis are already resistant to the 60-year-old drugs that are still the first line of treatment for nearly all TB patients. If a person is unlucky enough to have drug-resistant TB, the next step is costly testing to determine if their body can withstand harsh, alternative treatments. The United States helped pay for those tests in many countries, which means that now fewer people with drug-resistant TB are being diagnosed or treated. Instead, they are almost certainly getting sicker and spreading the infection.

Drug-resistant TB is harder to cure in individual patients, and so the aid freeze will directly lead to many deaths. But giving the bacteria so many new opportunities to develop drug resistance is also a threat to all of humanity. We now risk the emergence of TB strains that can’t be cured with our existing tools. The millennia-long history of humans’ fight against TB has seen many vicious cycles. I fear we are watching the dawn of another.

This article has been adapted from John Green’s forthcoming book, Everything Is Tuberculosis.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

In the less than two months since Donald Trump took office, he has upended decades of foreign policy by targeting the country’s allies. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined last night to discuss the effects of his policies in the U.S. and across the globe.

Meanwhile, Congress averted a government shutdown on Friday evening, passing a bill that will fund the government through September. Although Chuck Schumer of New York rallied enough votes for the bill, some Democrats now say that the minority leader capitulated to Trump. Especially among House Democrats from districts that the president carried in the election, “they feel as though he kind of left them out to dry,” Laura Barrón-López said last night.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Laura Barrón-López, a White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour; Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch; and David Sanger, a White House and national-security correspondent at The New York Times.

Watch the full episode here.

America’s superrich have always found ways to avoid paying taxes, but in recent years, they’ve discovered what might be the mother of all loopholes. It’s a three-step process called “Buy, Borrow, Die,” and it allows people to amass a huge fortune, spend as much of it as they want, and pass the rest—untaxed—on to their heirs. The technique is so cleverly designed that the standard wish list of progressive tax reforms would leave it completely intact.

Step one: buy. The average American derives most of their disposable income from the wages they earn working a job, but the superrich are different. They amass their fortune by buying and owning assets that appreciate. Elon Musk hasn’t taken a traditional salary as CEO of Tesla since 2019; Warren Buffett, the chair of Berkshire Hathaway, has famously kept his salary at $100,000 for more than 40 years. Their wealth consists almost entirely of stock in the companies they’ve built or invested in. The tax-law scholars Edward Fox and Zachary Liscow found that even when you exclude the 400 wealthiest individuals in America, the remaining members of the top 1 percent hold $23 trillion in assets.

Unlike wages, which are taxed the moment they are earned, assets are taxed only at the moment they are sold—or, in tax terms, “realized.” The justification for this approach is that unrealized assets exist only on paper; you can’t pay for a private jet or buy a company with stocks, even if they have appreciated by billions of dollars. In theory, the rich will eventually need to sell their assets for cash, at which point they will pay taxes on their increase in wealth.

That theory would be much closer to reality if not for step two: borrow. Instead of selling their assets to make major purchases, the superrich can use them as collateral to secure loans, which, because they must eventually be repaid, are also not considered taxable income. Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle and America’s fourth-richest person, has pledged more than $30 billion of his company’s stock as collateral in order to fund his lavish lifestyle, which includes building a $270 million yacht, buying a $300 million island, and purchasing an $80 million mansion. A Forbes analysis found that, as of April 2022, Musk had pledged Tesla shares worth more than $94 billion, which “serve as an evergreen credit facility, giving Musk access to cash when he needs it.”

This strategy isn’t as common among the merely very rich, who may not have the expensive tastes that Ellison and Musk do, but it isn’t rare either. Liscow and Fox calculated that the top 1 percent of wealth-holders, excluding the richest 400 Americans, borrowed more than $1 trillion in 2022. And the approach appears to be gaining momentum. Last year, The Economist reported that, at Morgan Stanley and Bank of America alone, the value of “securities-backed loans” increased from $80 billion in 2018 to almost $150 billion in 2022. “The real question is: Why would you not borrow hundreds of millions, even billions, to fund the lifestyle you want to live?” Tom Anderson, a wealth-management consultant and former banker who specializes in these loans, told me. “This is such an easy tool to use. And the tax benefits are massive.”

[Annie Lowrey: Trump says his tax plan won’t benefit the rich—he’s exactly wrong]

You might think this couldn’t possibly go on forever. Eventually, the rich will need to sell off some of their assets to pay back the loan. That brings us to step three: die. According to a provision of the tax code known as “stepped-up basis”—or, more evocatively, the “angel of death” loophole—when an individual dies, the value that their assets gained during their lifetime becomes immune to taxation. Those assets can then be sold by the billionaire’s heirs to pay off any outstanding loans without them having to worry about taxes.

The justification for the stepped-up-basis rule is that the United States already levies a 40 percent inheritance tax on fortunes larger than $14 million, and it would be unfair to tax assets twice. In practice, however, a seemingly infinite number of loopholes allow the rich to avoid paying this tax, many of which involve placing assets in byzantine legal trusts that enable them to be passed seamlessly from one generation to the next. “Only morons pay the estate tax,” Gary Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive and the then–chief economic adviser to Donald Trump, memorably remarked in 2017.

“All of this is completely, perfectly legal,” Edward McCaffery, the scholar who coined the term Buy, Borrow, Die, told me. But, he said, the strategy “has basically killed the entire concept of an income tax for the wealthiest individuals.” The tax economist Daniel Reck, who has spent his career documenting the various ways the rich evade taxation, told me that Buy, Borrow, Die is “the most important tax-avoidance strategy today.” The result is a two-tiered tax system: one for the many, who earn their income through wages and pay taxes, and another for the few, who accumulate wealth through paper assets and largely do not pay taxes.

Much of the debate around American tax policy focuses on the income-tax rate paid by the very wealthiest Americans. But the bulk of those people’s fortunes doesn’t qualify as income in the first place. A 2021 ProPublica investigation of the private tax records of America’s 25 richest individuals found that they collectively paid an effective tax rate of just 3.4 percent on their total wealth gain from 2014 to 2018. Musk paid 3.3 percent, Jeff Bezos 1 percent, and Buffett—who has famously argued for imposing higher income-tax rates on the superrich—just 0.1 percent.

The same dynamic exists, in slightly less egregious form, further down the wealth distribution. A 2021 White House study found that the 400 richest American households paid an effective tax rate of 8.2 percent on their total wealth gains from 2010 to 2018. Liscow and Fox found that, excluding the top 400, the rest of the 0.1 percent richest individuals paid an effective rate of 12 percent from 2004 to 2022. (Twelve percent is the income-tax rate paid by individuals who make $11,601 to $47,150 a year.)

One solution to this basic unfairness would be to tax unrealized assets. In 2022, the Biden administration proposed a “billionaire minimum tax” that would have placed a new annual levy of up to 20 percent on the appreciation of even unsold assets for households with more than $100 million in wealth. Experts have vehemently debated the substantive merits of such a policy; the real problem, however, is political. According to a survey conducted by Liscow and Fox, most Americans oppose a tax on unrealized gains even when applied only to the richest individuals. The Joe Biden proposal, perhaps unsurprisingly, went nowhere in Congress. Making matters more complicated, even if such a policy did pass, the Supreme Court would very likely rule it unconstitutional.

[James Kwak: The tax code for the ultra-rich vs. the one for everyone else]

A second idea would be to address the “borrow” step. Last year, Liscow and Fox published a proposal to tax the borrowing of households worth more than $100 million, which they estimated would raise about $10 billion a year. The limitation of that solution, as the authors acknowledge, is that it would not address the larger pool of rich Americans who don’t borrow heavily against their assets but do take advantage of stepped-up basis.

That leaves the “die” step. Tax experts from across the political spectrum generally support eliminating the “stepped-up basis” rule, allowing unrealized assets to be taxed at death. This would be far more politically palatable than the dead-on-arrival billionaire’s minimum tax: In the same survey in which respondents overwhelmingly opposed broad taxes on unrealized assets during life, Liscow and Fox also found that nearly two-thirds of them supported taxing unrealized assets at death.

Even a change this widely supported, however, would run up against the iron law of democratic politics: Policies with concentrated benefits and distributed costs are very hard to overturn. That’s especially true when the benefits just so happen to be concentrated among the richest, most powerful people in the country. In fact, the Biden administration did propose eliminating stepped-up basis as part of its Build Back Better legislation. The move prompted an intense backlash from special-interest groups and their allied politicians, with opponents portraying the provision as an assault on rural America that would destroy family farms and businesses. These claims were completely unfounded—the bill had specific exemptions for family businesses and applied only to assets greater than $2.5 million—but the effort succeeded at riling up enough Democratic opposition to kill the idea.

The one guarantee of any tax regime is that, eventually, the rich and powerful will learn how to game it. In theory, a democratic system, operating on behalf of the majority, should be able to respond by making adjustments that force the rich to pay their fair share. But in a world where money readily translates to political power, voice, and influence, the superrich have virtually endless resources at their disposal to make sure that doesn’t happen. To make society more equal, you need to tax the rich. But to tax the rich, it helps for society to be more equal.