Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich -- And Cheat Everybody Else

One of the country's top investigative reporters reveals how the richest 1 percent of the country has rigged the tax code and other laws in its favor.

Since the mid-1970s, there has been a dramatic shift in America's socioeconomic system, one that has gone virtually unnoticed by the general public. Tax policies and their enforcement have become a disaster, and thanks to discreet lobbying by a segment of the top 1 percent, Washington is reluctant or unable to fix them. The corporate income tax, the estate tax, and the gift tax have been largely ignored by the media. But the cumulative results are remarkable: today someone who earns a yearly salary of $60,000 pays a larger percentage of his income in taxes than the four hundred richest Americans.

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter David Cay Johnston exposes exactly how the middle class is being squeezed to create a widening wealth gap that threatens the stability of the country. By relating the compelling tales of real people across all areas of society, he reveals the truth behind:

• "middle class" tax cuts and exactly whom they benefit
• how workers are being cheated out of their retirement plans while disgraced CEOs walk away with millions
• how some corporations avoid paying any federal income tax
• how a law meant to prevent cheating by the top 2 percent of Americans no longer affects most of them, but has morphed into a stealth tax on single mothers making just $28,000
• why the working poor are seven times more likely to be audited by the IRS than everyone else
• how the IRS became so weak that even when it was handed complete banking records detailing massive cheating by 1,600 people, it prosecuted only 4 percent of them

Johnston has been breaking pieces of this story on the front page of The New York Times for seven years. With Perfectly Legal, he puts the whole shocking narrative together in a way that will stir up media attention and make readers angry about the state of our country.

"[Johnston's] book is a thoughtful overview for any citizens willing to educate themselves on the issue." Publishers Weekly

"Despite its sarcastic title, Perfectly Legal is a scrupulously reported, anecdotally rich wake-up call urging all of us to not only follow the money but also pay the piper." Boston Globe

"As Johnston knows, the real scandal of our federal tax system isn't so much what the rich didn't pay. It's what the rest of us now have to." James K. Galbraith, The New York Times Book Review

"Perfectly Legal...stands as one of the best, and certainly one of the most thorough examinations of the perfidies of recent tax policy in the United States." San Diego Union-Tribune

David Cay Johnston won a Pulitzer Prize and shared in another for his investigative reporting in The New York Times, for which he has written since 1995. Prior to that he wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Los Angeles Times, the Detroit Free Press, and the San Jose Mercury News. Johnston is a frequent guest on NPR's Fresh Air.