It gets worse every year. The IRS enforcement arm has been defunded. They have to apply the calculus of whether to spend their whole budget to tilt at the windmill of enforcement against a single billionaire, with a low likelihood of success, vs enforcement on a bunch of low-level cheats.
The effective tax rate for a given wealthy person should never drop below 15% over a long period of time. That’s the minimum capital gains tax rate. Some exploits can push that out—-claiming losses to defer, borrowing against unrealized gains, moving tax burden around different jurisdictions—-but ultimately those should all come out in the wash over time. Eventually, any given individual should, by law, be paying an effective tax rate of approximately 15%, minimum. The misperception is that one can legally bounce from one avoidance to another over time. By law, using one scheme should cause a subsequent correction and make up for the avoidance in a future tax year. But unraveling the serial tax avoidance becomes untenable for the IRS.
So, tl;dr no, just because they get away with it doesn’t mean it’s legal.
