Businesses. I’ve seen ‘the back end’ of an upper middle class family with a business, and the ways the mother (the tax genius of the scheme) moved money around and labeled various things as expenses for businesses was wild. None of it was illegal, it just was clearly not the intended purpose of the tax laws. One example I clearly remember was sticking five cattle on each of the properties they purchased, and all taxes just disappeared (went from thousands of dollars to just… dollars) due to agricultural exemptions. All of the cattle and their care suddenly became expenses, because the labor they hired to care for them was somehow completely deductible or expensable or however the law looked at it, which allowed them to shuffle money from another business to make it look negative…

and so on and so forth. I think they had more than four businesses that were legally separate (and incorporated, with the board being family members [and those family members are part of a trust that let even more shenanigans happen]) but supported the way money was shuffled. This was for a family that, at most, made ~ $500,000. Super high, above that 1% mark, but not even close to the insanity that the truly wealthy can pull off. Anything business related opens up an exponential number of ways to move money, even while using it, compared to the options a casual income-only tax-payer has.

As much as we can point at ‘Trump, dumb’ and tell ourselves that the rich are stupid but lucky, the majority are not at his level. They hire (multiple) people making six figures to manage their money because that investment pays off.