Ed McCaffery loves the freedom of being a law professor. Part of the fun, he says, is being able to pick and choose what issues to delve into.
Over the course of his 35-year career at USC Gould School of Law, McCaffery — the Robert C. Packard Trustee Chair in Law and professor of law, economics and political science — has become one of the nation’s leading experts on tax policy and politics.
He recently appeared on various news outlets to weigh in on the President-elect’s plans to impose tariffs on foreign goods and slash personal taxes.
“I think some of what you should do as a law professor is help ordinary people,” McCaffery says.
Hence his sound-bite-friendly style of translating the often-arcane field of tax law into language everyone can understand.
A catchphrase
More than 25 years ago, McCaffery coined the phrase, “buy, borrow, die” to explain how the rich use the U.S. tax system to their advantage: buy an asset that will increase in value, borrow money to live off based on the appreciating asset, and avoid the 20% capital gains tax for selling an asset by holding it until death and bequeathing it to loved ones.
The phrase was picked up by leading media outlets and since has become well known.
In 2016, McCaffery launched the nonprofit website, The People’s Tax Page, with the motto, “Tax Policy for the People,” that features animated cartoons starring Sabrina the Unicorn (named after his daughter) who explains tax policy for average people to understand.
As for the planned tariffs, McCaffery believes tariffs essentially are sales taxes that will hurt most average working Americans the hardest, as he wrote in a CNN Opinion piece earlier this year. All throughout 2024, McCaffery’s insights on tax have been much sought-after by media nationwide, from The New Yorker to Forbes to ABC News.
Upcoming book
A 2020 article by McCaffery, The Death of the Income Tax (or the Rise of the Universal Wage Tax), published in the Indiana Law Journal, is his most downloaded article. The White House even adopted a phrase coined by McCaffery: “We tax work, not wealth,” he notes.
McCaffery’s latest book, co-written with David Gamage, The Income Tax Collapse: ‘Buy, Borrow, Die’ and Beyond, is expected to be published by Oxford University Press next year.
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