The biggest beneficiaries of government largess are not those who struggle along on Social Security payments, Medicare or Medicaid benefits, or earned-income tax credits, despite what Mitt Romney has told his donors. Rather, they are those at the highest end of the income scale: government contractors, corporate farmers and very rich individuals who have figured out how to exploit the country’s poorly written tax code for their benefit.

The latter group’s most prominent member is Mr. Romney himself, whose astonishingly low tax rates are made possible by finding and using every loophole and flaw in the code. What his tax practices show is not illegal or unethical behavior, but rather the unfairness of a tax system that provides its most outlandish benefits only for the very, very rich and savvy. What is worse is that Mr. Romney has proposed making this profoundly dysfunctional system even more unfair.

Some of Mr. Romney’s financial tactics are well-known, like structuring his income so that most of it is taxed at the low capital-gains rate of 15 percent, or stashing investments in tax havens like Switzerland or the Cayman Islands. (The Times reported on Tuesday that the use of these havens not only saved him money, significantly enhancing his sizable retirement account, but also helped his company attract foreign investments.) But other strategies are so obscure that they are only known to the very few who worry about passing millions to their heirs without paying transfer taxes.

As Bloomberg News recently reported, Mr. Romney has managed to move nearly $100 million worth of assets into a trust for his heirs without paying any gift tax, which, like the estate tax, was established to ensure that society benefits from the dynastic transfer of great wealth. When he was running Bain Capital, the private equity firm, in 1998, he gave the trust shares of an Internet ad company, DoubleClick, in which Bain had invested, just before the company went public. The shares were worth little then, but insiders like Mr. Romney knew the company could flourish. After the company went public, the value of the shares went up tenfold. The trust then sold the shares, but their increased value escaped the gift tax because that tax applies just to the original value of the gift.