Michael Tomasky

Michael stirs a pot that I've had stewing for awhile. The right-wingers have built a vast media infrastructure whose primary job is to lie, twist, and misinform its viewers. No matter what happens, these guys will come up with a pro-rightward spin. No matter what good things might have come from the Biden/Harris administration, they will either neglect the story outright so their viewers will never see that news, or twist it again somehow to favor Republicans. They just do not care about the truth.

Now that Trump is becoming president again, any good thing will be trumpeted as done by Trump, and anything bad will be blamed on Democrats. Some Democrats these days are thinking, "Well, when Trump's voters get to see up close what he is doing, they will turn on him." No, I doubt it. The right-wing machine will kick in and spin it to favor the GOP, and their viewers will eat it up. They just do not care about the truth.

Michael makes similar points here. I'm not suggesting we "give up," but Democrats have to figure out how to counter the power of the right-wing mediaverse. Repetition is the key to "learning" I remember learning in school. It's also the key to brainwashing. Repeat the lying garbage often enough, trash the Dems while you're at it, and you have a large chunk of the population driven by hate and misinformation, swallowing every lie uttered by the right.

The Supreme Court ruled that lies are protected free speech under the First Amendment. United States v. Alvarez (2012) opened the door and Fox raced thru it, reaching new depths of deception. Restoring the Fairness Doctrine would help. Short of that, it's time that the moderate-to-liberal billionaires out there start to help the Dems counter the tsunami of lies spewed every day on right-wing media.

Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?

It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer.

Michael Tomasky

Nov 8, 2024

I’ve had a lot of conversations since Tuesday revolving around the question of why Donald Trump won. The economy and inflation. Kamala Harris didn’t do this or that. Sexism and racism. The border. That trans-inmate ad that ran a jillion times. And so on.

These conversations have usually proceeded along lines where people ask incredulously how a majority of voters could have believed this or that. Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president?

The answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”

But this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the crucial one: Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.

The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.

If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.

I’ve been in the media for three decades, and I’ve watched this happen from the front row. Fox News came on the air in 1996. Then, it was an annoyance, a little bug the mainstream media could brush off its shoulder. There was also Rush Limbaugh; still, no comparison between the two medias. Rush was talented, after a fashion anyway, but couldn’t survive in a mainstream lane (recall how quickly the experiment of having him be an ESPN color commentator went off the rails.) But in the late 1990s, and after the Internet exploded and George W. Bush took office, the right-wing media grew and grew. At first, the liberal media grew as well along with the Internet, in the form of a robust blogosphere that eventually spawned influential, agenda-setting web sites like HuffPost. But billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left—whose ad-supported, VC-funded operations started to fizzle out once social media and Google starting eating up the revenue pie.

And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beachball, and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball, and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.

This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.

And that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times.

That atmosphere would have denied an outrageous figure like Trump the oxygen he needed to survive and flourish. He just would not have been taken seriously at all. In that world, ruled by a traditional mainstream media, Trump would have been seen by Republicans as a liability, and they would have done what they failed to do in real life—banded together to marginalize him.

But the existence of Fox changed everything. Fox hosted the early debates, which Trump won not with intelligence, but outrageousness. He tapped into the grievance culture Fox had nursed among conservatives for years. He had (most of the time) Rupert Murdoch’s personal blessing. In 2015-16, Fox made Trump possible.

And this year, Fox and the rest of the right-wing media elected him. I discussed all this Thursday with Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America, who watches lots of Fox News so the rest of us don’t have to. He made the crucial point—and you must understand this—that nearly all the crazy memes that percolated into the news-stream during this election came not from Trump or JD Vance originally, but from somewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem.

The fake story about Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio eating cats and dogs, for example, started with a Facebook post citing second- and third-hand sources, Gertz told me; it then “circulated on X and was picked up by all the major right-wing influencers.” Only then did Vance, a very online dude, notice it and decide to run with it. And then Trump said it himself at the debate. But it started in the right-wing media.

Likewise with the post-debate ABC “whistleblower” claims, which Gertz wrote about at the time. This was the story that ABC, which hosted the only presidential debate this election, fed Team Harris the questions in advance. This started, Gertz wrote, as a “wildly flimsy internet rumor launched by a random pro-Trump X poster.” Soon enough, the right-wing media was all over it.

Maybe that one didn’t make a huge difference (although who knows?), but this one, I believe, absolutely did: the idea that Harris and Joe Biden swiped emergency aid away from the victims of Hurricane Helene (in mostly Southern, red states) and gave it all to undocumented migrants. It did not start with Trump or his campaign or Vance or the Republican National Committee or Lindsey Graham. It started on Fox. Only then did the others pick it up. And it was key, since this was a moment when Harris’s momentum in the polling averages began to flag.

I think a lot of people who don’t watch Fox or listen to Sinclair radio don’t understand this crucial chicken-and-egg point. They assume that Trump says something, and the right-wing media amplify it. That happens sometimes. But more often, it’s the other way around. These memes start in the media sphere, then they become part of the Trump agenda.

I haven’t even gotten to the economy, about which there is so much to say. Yes—inflation is real. But the Biden economy has been great in many ways. The U.S. economy, wrote The Economist in mid-October, is “the envy of the world.” But in the right-wing media, the horror stories were relentless. And mainstream economic reporting too often followed that lead. Allow me to make the world’s easiest prediction: After 12:00 noon next January 20, it won’t take Fox News and Fox Business even a full hour to start locating every positive economic indicator they can find and start touting those. Within weeks, the “roaring Trump economy” will be conventional wisdom. (Eventually, as some of the fruits from the long tail of Bidenomics start growing on the vine, Trump may become the beneficiary of some real-world facts as well, taking credit for that which he opposed and regularly denounced.)

Back to the campaign. I asked Gertz what I call my “Ulan Bator question.” If someone moved to America from Ulan Bator, Mongolia in the summer and watched only Fox News, what would that person learn about Kamala Harris? “You would know that she is a very stupid person,” Gertz said. “You’d know that she orchestrated a coup against Joe Biden. That she’s a crazed extremist. And that she very much does not care about you.”

Same Ulan Bator question about Trump? That he’s been “the target of a vicious witch-hunt for years and years,” that he is under constant assault; and most importantly, that he is “doing it all for you.”

To much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side’s view of things. It’s simply “the news.” This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you’ve seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That’s reach, and that’s power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it’s owned by Sinclair, and it, too, has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the oped page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro.

Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff. I would beg them to see it. Watch some Fox. Listen to some Christian radio. Experience the news that millions of Americans are getting on a daily basis. You’ll pretty quickly come to understand what I’m saying here.

And then contemplate this fact: If you think they’re done, you’re in fantasy land. They’re not happy with the rough parity, the slight advantage they have now. They want media domination. Sinclair bought the once glorious Baltimore Sun. Don’t think they’ll stop there. I predict Sinclair or the News Corp. will own The Washington Post one day. Maybe sooner than we think.

I implore you. Contemplate this. If you’re of a certain age, you have a living memory of revolutions in what we used to call the Third World. Question: What’s the first thing every guerilla army, whether of the left or the right, did once they seized the palace? They took over the radio or television station. First. There’s a reason for that.

It’s the same reason Viktor Orban told CPAC in 2022: “Have your own media.”

This is a crisis. The Democratic brand is garbage in wide swaths of the country, and this is the reason. Consider this point. In Missouri on Tuesday, voters passed a pro-abortion rights initiative, and another that raised the minimum wage and mandated paid leave. These are all Democratic positions. But as far as electing someone to high office, the Man-Boy Love Party could probably come closer than the Democrats. Trump beat Harris there by 18 points, and Senator Josh Hawley beat Lucas Kunce, who ran a good race and pasted Hawley in their debate, by 14 points.

The reason? The right-wing media. And it’s only growing and growing. And I haven’t even gotten to social media and Tik Tok and the other platforms from which far more people are getting their news these days. The right is way ahead on those fronts too. Liberals must wake up and understand this and do something about it before it’s too late, which it almost is.

Original.

USAFacts

USAFacts is the brainchild of Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft and current owner of the Los Angeles Clippers (an NBA team). It's an interesting place to go for "real" figures involving our government. Will the "right" accept Ballmer's data? They should. But will they? Who knows? They are probably busy developing their own "AlternativeFacts."

Here's s a short blurb on Wikipedia, which you should be supporting, BTW.

USAFacts is a not-for-profit organization and website that provides data and reports on the United States population, its government's finances, and government's impact on society.^[1][2] It was launched in 2017.^[3]

USAFacts was founded by former Microsoft CEO and owner of the Los Angeles Clippers,^[4] Steve Ballmer.^[5][6] Ballmer invested his own money in the project.^[7] USAFacts was launched on April 18, 2017, Tax Day, with the goal of making government data about tax revenues, expenditures, and outcomes more accessible and understandable. USAFacts's platform is designed to provide information to the public about government spending and impact at all levels, from federal to local.^[8][9][10] It includes information about border apprehensions, climate, immigration, active shooters, medicare, education, military spending and opioids.^[4] It also helps entrepreneurs to figure out the best location to launch or invest in businesses.^{[7][non-primary source needed]}

At launch, the website gathered data from over 70 government agencies and pulls data from more than 130 US government statistical databases and reports.^{[11][non-primary source needed]} Only official government data is included in the site.^[12][13][5]

How much does the government spend, really?

The government's spending depends on the revenue it collects through taxes, customs duties, and other sources. Of course, it often spends more money than it brings in. When this happens, the government borrows funds, contributing to the national debt.  In FY 2023 (October 1, 2022, to September 30, 2023), the federal government spent about $6.2 trillion, or about $18,400 per person. This was down 8.5% from the previous fiscal year but up 15.9% from FY 2019.

In FY 2023, about 58% of federal spending went to three major spending priorities: Social Security ($1.4 trillion), defense ($1.1 trillion), and transfers to state and local governments (also $1.1 trillion).   Medicare accounted for 14% while interest on the debt accounted for another 11%. Meanwhile, 18% went to a large grouping of “other” programs, ranging from $31 billion for Pell Grants to $124 billion for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (often called “food stamps”) and $17 billion on technology infrastructure.  From 1980 to 2023, federal spending grew 2.8 times while the US population grew about 1.5 times. The takeaway? The federal government is spending more per person than it did years ago.

Explore spending data

The least efficient government programs

Thirty-seven government spending priorities are considered highly vulnerable to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement, according to the independent, nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO). The GAO provides this information in an effort to help save taxpayers money. Here’s an overview of the GAO’s process and what’s on its watchlist.  Since 1990, the GAO has produced a list of federal programs at high risk for financial issues and in need of reform. These issues can, among other things, threaten the nation's public health or safety, national security, and economic growth. The GAO might also include programs at risk of losing at least $1 billion.

This year’s list of 37 programs included improving and modernizing federal disability programs, NASA’s acquisition management, Health and Human Services’ leadership of public health emergencies, and contract management at the Defense Department.   The GAO highlighted five areas in particular need of attention:   National cybersecurity  Government responses to drug abuse  Federal food safety oversight  Government liability for environmental cleanup  Managing fiscal risks associated with climate change  The list included 14 high-risk programs in 1990. The GAO has added 53 programs since then and removed 29 after they demonstrated adequate improvement.  According to the GAO, Congressional and agency actions addressing high-risk areas saved the government an estimated $100 billion between 2021 and 2023.

More about the GAO’s findings

Data behind the news

Authorities are saying that the firearm used to kill UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Brian Thompson was a ghost gun, meaning it was made privately and lacks the serial numbers typically used to trace firearms. The number of ghost guns sent to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has more than tripled since 2019.    A rebel group assumed control of the Syrian government. Civil war has raged across the country for more than 13 years. From 2011 to 2023, Syria ranked sixth highest for refugees coming to the United States.    See how much you know about government data with the weekly fact quiz.

One last fact

In October, New York City had the nation’s highest inflation rate at 4.0%, followed by Chicago (3.5%) and Baltimore (3.4%).     Phoenix had the lowest rate, at 1.6%, followed by Atlanta (1.9%) and Houston (2.1%).     New inflation data just came out last week. Click here to see how the cities included in the new Consumer Price Index report are faring now.

Paul Krugman

Krugman is leaving the New York Times after some 23+ years there. But he will be around somewhere. 

My Last Column: Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment

by Paul Krugman

Dec 9, 2024

This is my final column for The New York Times, where I began publishing my opinions in January 2000. I’m retiring from The Times, not the world, so I’ll still be expressing my views in other places. But this does seem like a good occasion to reflect on what has changed over these past 25 years.

What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired.

It’s hard to convey just how good most Americans were feeling in 1999 and early 2000. Polls showed a level of satisfaction with the direction of the country that looks surreal by today’s standards. My sense of what happened in the 2000 election was that many Americans took peace and prosperity for granted, so they voted for the guy who seemed as if he’d be more fun to hang out with.

In Europe, too, things seemed to be going well. In particular, the introduction of the euro in 1999 was widely hailed as a step toward closer political as well as economic integration — toward a United States of Europe, if you like. Some of us ugly Americans had misgivings, but initially they weren’t widely shared.

Of course, it wasn’t all puppies and rainbows. There was, for example, already a fair bit of proto-QAnon-type conspiracy theorizing and even instances of domestic terrorism in America during the Clinton years. There were financial crises in Asia, which some of us saw as a potential harbinger of things to come; I published a 1999 book titled “The Return of Depression Economics,” arguing that similar things could happen here; I put out a revised edition a decade later, when they did.

Still, people were feeling pretty good about the future when I began writing for this paper.

Why did this optimism curdle? As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest.

It was not always thus. Back in 2002 and ’03, those of us who argued that the case for invading Iraq was fundamentally fraudulent received a lot of pushback from people refusing to believe that an American president would do such a thing. Who would say that now?

In a different way, the financial crisis of 2008 undermined any faith the public had that governments knew how to manage economies. The euro as a currency survived the European crisis that peaked in 2012, which sent unemployment in some countries to Great Depression levels, but trust in Eurocrats — and belief in a bright European future — didn’t.

It’s not just governments that have lost the public’s trust. It’s astonishing to look back and see how much more favorably banks were viewed before the financial crisis.

And it wasn’t that long ago that technology billionaires were widely admired across the political spectrum, some achieving folk-hero status. But now they and some of their products face disillusionment and worse; Australia has even banned social media use by children under 16.

Which brings me back to my point that some of the most resentful people in America right now seem to be angry billionaires.

We’ve seen this before. After the 2008 financial crisis, which was widely (and correctly) attributed in part to financial wheeling and dealing, you might have expected the erstwhile Masters of the Universe to show a bit of contrition, maybe even gratitude at having been bailed out. What we got instead was “Obama rage,” fury at the 44th president for even suggesting that Wall Street might have been partly to blame for the disaster.

These days there has been a lot of discussion of the hard right turn of some tech billionaires, from Elon Musk on down. I’d argue that we shouldn’t overthink it, and we especially shouldn’t try to say that this is somehow the fault of politically correct liberals. Basically it comes down to the pettiness of plutocrats who used to bask in public approval and are now discovering that all the money in the world can’t buy you love.

So is there a way out of the grim place we’re in? What I believe is that while resentment can put bad people in power, in the long run it can’t keep them there. At some point the public will realize that most politicians railing against elites actually are elites in every sense that matters and start to hold them accountable for their failure to deliver on their promises. And at that point the public may be willing to listen to people who don’t try to argue from authority, don’t make false promises, but do try to tell the truth as best they can.

We may never recover the kind of faith in our leaders — belief that people in power generally tell the truth and know what they’re doing — that we used to have. Nor should we. But if we stand up to the kakistocracy — rule by the worst — that’s emerging as we speak, we may eventually find our way back to a better world.

Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a distinguished professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman

Original.

Jensen Huang

This is yet another example of how the wealthy get all kinds of breaks that the regular person will never get. It's another sickening story, to follow that last sickening story about sexual abuse I posted. You know, they say that America is the greatest country in the world, despite having a few "warts." Well, America has warts alright, in spades. America has so many warts, it's starting to look like one gigantic wart on the face of humanity. Whenever I read a story like this, the faint echo returns...."USA! USA! USA!" and it makes me nauseous.

How One of the World's Richest Men Is Avoiding $8 Billion in Taxes

The chief executive of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, has taken advantage of popular loopholes in the federal estate and gift taxes, which have quietly been eviscerated.

by Jesse Drucker

December 5, 2024

Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, is the 10th-richest person in the United States, worth $127 billion. In theory, when he dies, his estate should pay 40 percent of his net worth to the government in taxes.

But Mr. Huang, 61, is not only an engineering genius and Silicon Valley icon whose company, the world’s second-most valuable, makes the chips that power much artificial intelligence. He is also the beneficiary of a series of tax dodges that will enable him to pass on much of his fortune tax free, according to securities and tax filings reviewed by The New York Times.

The savings for his family are on a pace to be roughly $8 billion. It likely ranks among the largest tax dodges in the United States.

The types of strategies Mr. Huang has deployed to shield his wealth have become ubiquitous among the ultrawealthy. Blackstone Group’s Stephen A. Schwarzman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and top executives at Google, Coinbase, Eli Lilly, Mastercard and Advanced Micro Devices have collectively shifted billions of dollars into financial vehicles in order to avoid the federal estate tax, according to a Times analysis of securities disclosures.

It is just one sign of how the estate tax — imposed solely on a sliver of the country’s multimillionaires — has been eviscerated.

Revenue from the tax has barely changed since 2000, even as the wealth of the richest Americans has roughly quadrupled. If the estate tax had simply kept pace, it would have raised around $120 billion last year. Instead it brought in about a quarter of that.

That missing revenue would be enough to simultaneously double the budget of the Justice Department and triple federal funding for cancer and Alzheimer’s research.

The story of Mr. Huang’s tax avoidance is a case study in how the ultrarich bend the U.S. tax system for their benefit. His strategies were not explicitly authorized by Congress. Instead, they were cooked up by creative lawyers who have exploited a combination of obscure federal regulations, narrow findings by courts and rulingsthat the Internal Revenue Service issues in individual cases that then served as models for future tax shelters. As such strategies became widespread, they effectively became the law.

“You have an army of well-trained, brilliant people who sit there all day long, charging $1,000 an hour, thinking up ways to beat this tax,” said Jack Bogdanski, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School and the author of a widely cited treatise on the estate tax. “Don’t expect anyone in Congress to stop this.”

The richest Americans are able to pass down approximately $200 billion each year without paying estate tax on it, thanks to the use of complex trusts and other avoidance strategies, estimated Daniel Hemel, a tax law professor at New York University.

Enforcement of the rules governing the estate tax has eased in part because the I.R.S. has been decimated by years of budget cuts. In the early 1990s, the agency audited more than 20 percent of all estate tax returns. By 2020, the rate had fallen to about 3 percent.

(See Original for a chart here that I could not paste.)

The trend is likely to accelerate with Republicans controlling both the White House and Capitol Hill. They are already slashing funding for law enforcement by the I.R.S. The incoming Senate majority leader, John Thune, and other congressional Republicans for years have been trying to kill the estate tax, branding it as a penalty on family farms and small businesses.

Yet Mr. Huang’s multibillion-dollar maneuver — detailed in the fine print of his filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and his foundation’s disclosures to the I.R.S. — shows the extent to which the estate tax has already been hollowed out.

“From an estate-tax-planning perspective, it’s a grand slam,” said Jonathan Blattmachr, a prominent trusts and estates lawyer who reviewed Mr. Huang’s disclosures for The Times. “He’s done a magnificent job.”

An Nvidia spokeswoman, Stephanie Matthew, declined to discuss details of the Huangs’ tax strategies.

‘Only Morons’

Going back millenniums, governments have sought to slow the buildup of dynastic wealth. Augustus Caesar in ancient Rome taxed wealth at death. Adam Smith, the intellectual father of laissez-faire capitalism, attacked inherited fortunes. During the last Gilded Age, so did some of America’s wealthiest men. “By taxing estates heavily at death, the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life,” Andrew Carnegie said.

The United States adopted the modern estate tax in 1916. In recent decades, congressional Republicans have successfully watered it down, cutting the rate and increasing the amount that is exemptfrom the tax. Today, a married couple can pass on about $27 milliontax free; anything more than that is generally supposed to be taxed at a 40 percent rate.

Billionaires have made a sport out of trying to avoid the tax. Gary Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive who was President-elect Donald J. Trump’s chief economic adviser during his first administration, once quipped that “only morons pay the estate tax.”

Mr. Huang is no moron. In 1993, he and two other engineers were eating in a booth at a Denny’s in San Jose, Calif., when they came up with the idea for a powerful new computer chip that would be the basis for Nvidia. The company was initially focused on making chips for 3-D graphics, but by the 2000s it was branching into other areas, such as supplying semiconductors for Tesla’s electric vehicles.

(See Original for chart inserted here.)

In 2012, Mr. Huang and his wife, Lori, took one of their first steps to shield their fortune from the estate tax.

They set up a financial vehicle known as an irrevocable trust and moved 584,000 Nvidia shares into it, according to a securities disclosure that Mr. Huang filed. The shares at the time were worth about $7 million, but they would eventually generate tax savings many times greater.

The Huangs were taking advantage of a precedent set nearly two decades earlier, in 1995, when the I.R.S. blessed a transaction that tax professionals affectionately nicknamed “I Dig It.” (The moniker was a play on the name of the type of financial vehicle involved: an intentionally defective grantor trust.)

One of the beauties of I Dig It was that it had the potential to largely circumvent not only the estate tax but also the federal gift tax. That tax applies to assets that multimillionaires give to their heirs while they’re alive and essentially serves as a backstop to the estate tax; otherwise, rich people could give away all their money before they die in order to avoid the estate tax.

Here’s how the I Dig It arrangement worked. Say that a hypothetical tycoon, John Doe, gave $10 million in cash to a trust for the benefit of his children. He wouldn’t have to pay gift taxes on that unless he had already hit the $27 million gift-tax exemption.

The trust could then use a combination of the $10 million and a loanfrom Mr. Doe to acquire $100 million of shares. Those shares wouldn’t be subject to the estate tax, thanks to the I.R.S.’s 1995 ruling.

There was an additional benefit. Say that the value of the shares in the trust soared tenfold. None of that would be subject to the estate tax. But it could trigger a $214 million capital gains tax bill — the $900 million gain taxed at 23.8 percent. Under a separate I.R.S. ruling, Mr. Doe could pay that tax on the trust’s behalf, without it counting as an additional gift to his heirs.

Otherwise, the trust would have to pay the capital gains tax bill, leaving a smaller fortune to future generations.

The I Dig It maneuver was enormously complicated — and enormously lucrative.

“I’ve always called it the gift that keeps on giving,” said Michael D. Mulligan, a veteran trusts and estates lawyer in St. Louis who helped create the strategy.

A parade of the ultrawealthy soon deployed variations of the technique, according to filings in court and with securities regulators.

The family of the media mogul Mel Karmazin used several I Dig Its. A former owner of the Detroit Pistons, Bill Davidson, used them to avoid more than $2.7 billion in taxes. Mitt Romney, who at the time was running the private equity firm Bain Capital and would later propose abolishing the estate tax as the Republican nominee for president in 2012, also used the technique.

The I.R.S. has challenged some setups that it viewed as overly aggressive. Mr. Davidson settled with the I.R.S. The agency claimed that the Karmazin family’s arrangements “lacked economic substance” and sought $2.4 million in back taxes. But the agency ultimately abandoned most of its arguments and collected about $100,000, according to a lawyer for the Karmazin family.

In Mr. Huang’s case, the details in securities filings are limited. But multiple experts, including Mr. Mulligan, said it was almost certainly a classic I Dig It gift, loan and sale transaction.

The $7 million of shares that Mr. Huang moved into his trust in 2012 are today worth more than $3 billion. If those shares were directly passed on to Mr. Huang’s heirs, they would be taxed at 40 percent — or well over $1 billion.

Instead, the tax bill will probably be no more than a few hundred thousand dollars.

First-Name Basis

The Huangs soon took another big step toward reducing their estate-tax bill.

Nvidia was emerging as the main provider of chips for artificial intelligence technology, eventually capturing more than 90 percentof the market. Mr. Huang was becoming a Silicon Valley celebrity. He adopted an all-black dress code. Such was his renown that he was known in tech circles simply by his first name, along with luminaries like Tesla’s Elon, Meta’s Mark and Google’s Sergey and Larry.

In 2016, the Huangs set up several vehicles known as grantor retained annuity trusts, or GRATs, securities filings show.

They were borrowing a strategy that had been invented years earlier on behalf of the ex-wife of Walmart’s co-founder. Beginning in 1993, Audrey Walton transferred about $200 million worth of shares to two GRATs. The twist was that the trusts had to eventually repay Ms. Walton the value of those shares, plus some modest interest. If the value of the shares went up more than what had to be repaid, the trusts could keep whatever was left over — tax free.

The I.R.S. contested the arrangement on narrow technical grounds. But in 2000, a U.S. Tax Court judge upheld its legality.

Mr. Hemel of New York University said the I.R.S. could have challenged the use of GRATs on other grounds as well. Instead, he said, the agency “capitulated” and essentially permitted the use of the trusts as an acceptable avenue for avoiding the estate tax.

Billionaires took notice. The Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein, the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the oil investor Harold Hamm, the cable magnates John Malone and Charles Dolan, and the designer Ralph Lauren were among those who set up GRATs soon after the Walton decision, according to disclosures in the men’s filings with the S.E.C. That positioned their families to collectively avoid billions of dollars in future tax bills.

Under President Barack Obama, the Treasury Department repeatedly tried to make it harder to avoid the estate tax, proposing restrictions on the use of GRATs and I Dig Its. But the proposals died in Congress. (In the Trump administration, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, himself a GRAT user, would halt efforts to close the loopholes.)

In 2016, Mr. Huang and his wife put just over three million Nvidia shares into their four new GRATs. The shares were worth about $100 million. If their value rose, the increase would be a tax-free windfall for their two adult children, who both work at Nvidia.

That is precisely what happened. The shares are now worth more than $15 billion, according to data from securities filings compiled for The Times by Equilar, a data firm. That means that the Huang family is poised to avoid roughly $6 billion in estate taxes.

If the Huangs’ trusts sell their shares, that will generate a hefty capital gains tax bill — more than $4 billion, based on Nvidia’s current stock price. Mr. and Mrs. Huang can pay that bill on behalf of the trusts, without it counting as a taxable gift to their heirs.

A Charitable Tax Dodge

Starting in 2007, Mr. Huang deployed another technique that will further reduce his family’s estate taxes. This strategy involved taking advantage of his and his wife’s charitable foundation.

Mr. Huang has given the Jen Hsun & Lori Huang Foundation shares of Nvidia that were worth about $330 million at the time of the donations. Such donations are tax-deductible, meaning they reduced the Huangs’ income tax bills in the years that the gifts took place.

Foundations are required to make annual donations to charities equal to at least 5 percent of their total assets. But the Huangs’ foundation, like those of many billionaires, is satisfying that requirement by giving heavily to what is known as a donor-advised fund.

Such funds are pools of money that the donor controls. There are limitations on how the money can be spent. Buying cars or vacation homes or the like is off limits. But a fund could, say, investmoney in a business run by the donor’s friend or donate enough money to name a building at a university that the donor’s children hope to attend.

There is a gaping loophole in the tax laws: Donor-advised funds are not required to actually give any money to charitable organizations.

When the donor dies, control of the fund can pass to his heirs — without incurring any estate taxes.

In recent years, 84 percent of the Huang foundation’s donations have gone to their donor-advised fund, named GeForce, an apparent nod to the name of an Nvidia videogame chip. The Nvidia shares that the Huangs have donated are today worth about $2 billion.

The fund is not required to disclose how its money is spent, though the foundation has said the assets will be used for charitable purposes. The Nvidia spokeswoman, Ms. Matthew, said those causes included higher education and public health.

But there is another benefit. Based on Nvidia’s current stock price, the donations to the fund have reduced Mr. Huang’s eventual estate-tax bill by about $800 million.

Kitty Bennett and Dylan Freedman contributed research.

Jesse Drucker is an investigative reporter for the Business section and has written extensively on the world of high end tax avoidance. More about Jesse Drucker

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