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A second, more heartening left-wing reaction to the Trump family’s financial history concerns the complexities that Fred Trump pursued in order to move money to his children in as tax-free a way as possible. As the Times notes, in the early 1990s, the estate tax faced by a wealthy New Yorker such as Mr. Trump Sr. was 55 per cent. One scheme he used to move his money down a generation was All County Building Supply & Maintenance, a company owned by his children that sold him the materials and services his real estate business required at a markup of “20 per cent, or 50 per cent or more.” The Times goes on to say it found fully 295 different streams by which Fred Trump moved money to his son.

On Slate’s Political Gabfest, the podcast I use for monitoring Democratic Party politics, a surprising reaction to all this tax creativity was that maybe it would be best to just ditch the estate tax, since trying to avoid it drives rich people to such extremes. The rationale was cast in humanities/psychological style terms: rich people’s visceral hatred of the very idea of estate taxation makes them crazy. But an economist would argue the real problem is not revulsion per se but the 55-per-cent rate. If the state could content itself with five or 10 per cent, it might find the executors of big estates (after the fact) or the creators of them (before the fact) might be more willing to pay their transfer taxes.

As a simple matter of economics, when hiding a dollar saves me 55 cents, I’m more likely to go ahead and try to hide it than if it only saves me five or 10 cents. That will be especially true if I have to pay my tax lawyers, say, 30 cents on the dollar to find the hiding places.

That people respond to taxes in just the way economists predict is a moment of great enlightenment. If the Trump family’s finagling does end up teaching the left that lesson, it may even have been worth the cost to the U.S. Treasury.