Everyone’s Arguing About Taxing the Rich. Almost Nobody Noticed the $1 Trillion Already Slipping Past the IRS

Jake FitzgeraldFri, August 21, 2026 at 10:49 PM UTC

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Schwab generated $70M in tax-alpha revenue in a single quarter while Goldman Sachs moved in after Fidelity restricted client access to the strategies.

More than $1 trillion sits in legal tax-avoidance strategies, with AQR's tax-loss assets surging from $3 billion to $70 billion since 2023.

Nearly 30% of California's billionaire tax base relocated before the wealth tax qualified for the ballot, draining $536 billion in wealth.

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The country heads into a midterm election in which wealth inequality is among the hottest topics. California is advancing a wealth tax. Progressives promise to make the rich pay a "fair share" as Social Security marches toward insolvency, and pharmacies lock up toothpaste.

Meanwhile, according to Bloomberg's "Great American Tax Dodge" series, more than $1 trillion is already deployed in "tax alpha" strategies devoted to delaying or shrinking payments to the government.

The strategies are legal, engineered by household-name asset managers, and growing faster than most tax bills Congress could pass.

Where the Money Actually Sits

Roughly $150 billion sits in tax-aware long-short accounts, with roughly $1 billion a week flowing in.

Per Bloomberg, AQR became the world's largest hedge fund, past $140 billion at the end of March, with about $70 billion in tax-loss strategies, up from about $3 billion in 2023. Rival Quantinno holds about $60 billion, up from almost nothing five years ago.

A Bloomberg analysis of SEC filings identified 105 ETFs created through Section 351 exchanges, holding $22.1 billion at launch and deferring at least $6.5 billion in embedded capital gains. More than half listed last year.

At Charles Schwab (NYSE:SCHW), the strategy generated roughly $70 million of revenue by the second quarter and about 1% of firm revenue, which totaled $7.07 billion in the second quarter, a business the 55-year-old firm entered only last year.

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How It Works

Tax-aware long-short accounts use leverage to hold winners and losers simultaneously. Losses get harvested to offset gains elsewhere: a business sale, an RSU vest, a concentrated stock position. A Section 351 conversion lets an investor swap appreciated stock into a new ETF without triggering tax, deferring the embedded gain, potentially forever if shares are held to death and stepped up to heirs. The techniques are old, but the scale is new.

Rate Being Avoided Is Already Historically Low

A half-century ago, when the private equity industry was just getting started, the top effective rate on long-term capital gains reached almost 40%, per the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. In the decades that followed the top federal rate fell as low as 15%. Today it is 23.8%, including the net investment income tax.

That is the rate the industry keeps engineering lower still. The political fight is over moving a number that fewer and fewer very large fortunes actually pay in full.

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Regulators Watching, Not Yet Acting

Treasury officials told an industry seminar in New York in July 2026 that some new strategies promise outcomes Congress did not intend when writing tax laws and are "potentially abusive," and that authorities will not turn a blind eye. Officials separately warned some strategies may be crossing lines "that should not be crossed."

Treasury first signaled interest in 351 conversions late last year, floating a "transactions of interest" label. No guidance has been issued. The Investment Company Institute filed a comment letter in May seeking clarity.

Fidelity, with almost $20 trillion under administration, indefinitely shut new clients out of the strategy and raised fees for some existing ones. Schwab tightened access in April and again in June. Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS), BNY Pershing and Apex Fintech Solutions moved in to fill the gap.

AQR added a disclosure acknowledging the IRS could someday bar the benefits or retroactively find them illegal, in which case "penalties may apply."

Critics and Defenders

Tom Steyer, the billionaire Democrat who ran an unsuccessful bid this year to become California's governor, told Bloomberg: "It's a game to see how rich they can be. Do I consider that unpatriotic, selfish and unrealistic in the long run? Absolutely."

Morris Pearl, the former BlackRock (NYSE:BLK) managing director who leads the "Patriotic Millionaires," said: "I am not going to say these people are evil, but a major industry in America is this sort of financial engineering."

Former FDIC chair Sheila Bair told Bloomberg: "There's no other reason to do it than avoid paying taxes. There's risk for the firms offering this."

AQR says it adapts its process "to be more tax efficient in a manner designed to operate within all relevant guidance and regulations". Crypto hedge fund founder David Tawil put the defense more bluntly: "Do not blame Cliff Asness" because he did not write the laws, "Go call the IRS."

Why the Debate You're Watching May Miss the Point

Every one of these maneuvers is legal. A debate over marginal rates assumes the rates determine what gets collected. The tax alpha industry bets they increasingly do not.

Some of the highest-income filers are simply leaving states that tax them hardest. Hoover Institution scholars found that nearly 30% of California's billionaire tax base had already departed before the wealth-tax initiative qualified for the ballot, an outflow they value at $536 billion in wealth. Whatever rate Congress or Sacramento sets, an industry and a moving van exist to route around it.

For readers whose income arrives through W-2 withholding and 1099s from a brokerage, available tools are narrower but real: tax-loss harvesting in a taxable brokerage account, ETFs over mutual funds where possible, the 0% long-term capital gains bracket if your income allows, and step-up in basis at death. That is the reader-scale version of what the trillion-dollar industry does at scale.

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Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Money”