Support for this podcast comes from the New Bower Family Foundation, supporting

WHY Wise Fresh Air and its commitment to sharing ideas and encouraging meaningful conversation.

This is Fresh Air.

I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross, who's off this week.

Increasing wealth inequality has become a widely acknowledged problem in the United States in recent years.

When the Biden administration pushed for passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, there were hopes it would take a step toward fairness by adjusting tax rates or policies for the wealthy and by strengthening the internal revenue services capacity to ensure people and corporations pay what they owe.

For some insight into what's happened and the state of tax policies for the wealthy, we turn to Jesse Eisinger, senior editor and reporter at ProPublica,

an independent non-profit news organization focused on investigative reporting.

He's written on the IRS's efforts to tax the rich in recent years, and over the last several months he's been an editor and worked with a team of reporters,

a series of stories drawn from a vast trove of IRS data ProPublica obtained.

The data included information on the tax returns of thousands of the nation's wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years.

The stories covered a variety of ways the ultra-rich shield income from federal taxation, such as claiming deductions from expensive hobbies like thoroughbred horse racing.

Jesse Eisinger is a veteran investigative reporter.

In 2011, he and ProPublica's Jake Bernstein won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on questionable practices on Wall Street.

Jesse Eisinger, welcome back to Fresh Air.

Let's talk about the inflation reduction act. There were a lot of goals for this legislation, and one of them was putting a dent in inequality of wealth.

There was reporting that there were changes in corporate taxes that were meaningful, could generate as much as 300 billion in revenue.

What's the story here? What actually happened?

Yes, this is a bad news and good news story for taxing the wealthy and holding the wealthy accountable.

In the bad news, the ambitions of the Democrats were ratcheted back significantly as they were for their other policy goals as in climate and social welfare spending.

We have a consensus now that wealth inequality is an enormous problem in the country, at least among economists, many policymakers, and Democrats, and even some centrist thinking Republicans.

But we don't have a system that taxes the wealthy equitably.

...