Eliminating buy-borrow-die would put $300 billion back into the economy annually, returned to federal revenue and downstream economic activity … Arizona alone — representing about 2% of U.S. GDP — would gain $3 to $5 billion per year.”
By Julia Tope | Phoenix
“Buy, borrow, die” isn’t the title of an action flick you missed. It’s a three-word strategy used by America’s elites — one so powerful, so brutally effective and so fundamentally rigged — that it has rewritten the meaning of wealth in this country.
Buy. Borrow. Die. Those words are not a slogan. They are the central wealth-preservation strategy of the ultra-rich — a playbook used by billionaires, dynastic families and the top 0.1% to avoid taxes, extract unearned financial power and pass unimaginable wealth to their heirs while the rest of the country struggles to keep up.
It’s not exaggeration to say this strategy is killing the American Dream. Working- and middle-class Americans are told to work hard, pay more taxes, save more, tighten your belts. Meanwhile, the ultra-wealthy give the impression that they “pay their fair share,” even as they borrow against untaxed assets, live tax-free on leveraged credit and pass everything to their children — also tax-free — when they die. Here’s how they pulled it off:
Buy: Turn money into appreciating assets, not income
The wealthy don’t get rich from paychecks. Paychecks are taxed. They buy businesses, stocks, real estate, private equity stakes — assets that grow quietly and exponentially without creating a taxable event. Their wealth sits in investments that balloon in value while producing no reportable income.
A billionaire’s money works harder than any human being ever could.
Meanwhile, middle-class wages are taxed at every turn: federal income tax, state income tax, Social Security, Medicare, sales tax, property tax, gas tax. The system punishes income and rewards ownership.
Borrow: Live tax-free by taking out loans on your own wealth
This is the heart of the strategy, and the biggest loophole in American tax law. When the rich need cash, they don’t sell assets. Selling triggers capital gains tax.
Instead, they walk into a private bank and say, “I want to borrow against my assets.” Banks provide low-interest “asset-backed loans” because the collateral — massive stock portfolios, commercial property, venture stakes — is bulletproof. The borrower gets millions in tax-free spending money while their wealth continues to compound.
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg have all used this strategy. ProPublica revealed that some billionaires live almost entirely off borrowed money, funding mansions, jets and lifestyles without selling a single taxable share.
Meanwhile, a working-class person pays high interest, takes personal liability, risks their credit and gets a worse rate than a billionaire borrowing for a yacht.
In America, wealth is power—but collateral is the real currency.
Die: Pass it all to heirs tax-free
The final step is the most devastating, in my opinion.
When a billionaire dies, their heirs receive assets with a step-up in basis. In simple terms, decades of gains — sometimes hundreds of millions — are wiped clean for tax purposes. Heirs can sell immediately, and the IRS pretends the assets never grew in value.
It is the greatest tax escape hatch ever created. And it is only available to families already born into extreme wealth.
For everyone else, inheritance means probate, debt and taxes on modest assets like homes and cars.
The result: A two-tier wealth system
Once you understand this strategy, modern American inequality becomes obvious:
Billionaires live tax-free while claiming they pay more than their share, millionaires borrow tax-advantageously, middle-class families borrow to survive, and pay higher taxes doing it, and working families are left with the one thing the wealthy avoid — taxable income.
The ultra-rich become richer through appreciation. The rest of the country treads water through wages.
The American Dream is not dying in a dramatic collapse — it is being slowly starved by a tax system engineered for those at the top.
Middle-class Americans are copying the system, with none of the upside
You hear advice everywhere: use a HELOC instead of selling your house; take out a business line of credit; borrow against your 401(k).
Middle-class families are encouraged to imitate the ultra-rich, but the cost is brutally different. When billionaires borrow, their interest is negligible and their assets continue to rise. When a middle-class family borrows, their interest rate eats them alive.
A tax code written by the rich, for the rich
The U.S. tax code heavily taxes workers, income, small business owners, hourly labor and middle class purchases, but it barely touches accumulated wealth, unrealized gains, dynastic inheritances, leveraged spending or generational transfers.
America is no longer a meritocracy, it’s a wealth-preservation machine.
Ending buy-borrow-die would change everything. A prosperous society cannot survive when nurses pay higher effective tax rates than billionaires, when wages are taxed but wealth is not, when the wealthiest individuals can avoid taxes for their entire lifetimes simply by dying at the right moment.
Eliminating buy-borrow-die would put $300 billion back into the economy annually, returned to federal revenue and downstream economic activity.
If that money flowed back into the real economy, instead of compounding inside dynastic wealth structures, it could strengthen Social Security, restore Medicare solvency, lower payroll taxes, fund infrastructure and water projects, provide annual household rebates. It also could reduce state income taxes for the bottom 80%, expand affordable housing and homelessness reduction, restore public universities and fund universal pre-K.
Arizona alone — representing about 2% of U.S. GDP — would gain $3 to $5 billion per year.
The real tragedy
The tragedy isn’t just that the ultra-wealthy created a tax escape hatch. It’s that ordinary Americans have been convinced to defend it.
We are told that taxing dynastic wealth is an attack on success — when in reality it is the only way to preserve opportunity for everyone else. We are told to distrust government — while billionaires quietly shape it. We are told to chase wealth — while the very system protecting billionaires ensures most of us will never reach it.
Buy. Borrow. Die. It is the motto of an aristocracy in everything but name. Unless we confront it, the American Dream will remain exactly that — a dream.
Julia Tope is a Valley real estate consultant. Please submit comments at yourvalley.net/letters or email them to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.
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