The 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs Act included a little-known provision establishing something called opportunity zones. The plan, which was lauded as a way to direct investments into under-developed communities in the U.S., created 8,764 tax havens that were almost immediately exploited by the wealthy to gobble up capital gains tax breaks. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Wessel explains how opportunity zones came to be, who is profiting off of them, and why it’s so difficult to tweak the tax code without creating windfalls for the rich. 

David Wessel is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at Brookings and director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy. He is the author of two New York Times bestsellers: “In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic” (2009)  and “Red Ink: Inside the High Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget” (2012). His most recent book is “Only the Rich Can Play: How Washington Works in the New Gilded Age” (2021). He has shared two Pulitzer Prizes, one in 1984 for a Boston Globe series on the persistence of racism in Boston and the other in 2003 for Wall Street Journal stories on corporate scandals.

Twitter: @davidmwessel

The Rich Have Found Another Way to Pay Less Tax: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/opinion/opportunity-zones-tax-loopholes.html?referringSource=articleShare

Only the Rich Can Play: https://bookshop.org/books/only-the-rich-can-play-how-washington-works-in-the-new-gilded-age/9781541757196

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