"If you're a full-time manager of your own property - and full-time, according to Congress, is 15 hours a week - you can take unlimited depreciation and use it to offset your income from other areas and pay little in tax. One of the biggest real estate tax lawyers in New York said to me, if you're a major real estate family and you're paying income taxes, you should sue your tax lawyer for malpractice."

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It was an easy thing to tax for a young country. And then gradually we moved to property taxes, manufacturing taxes, and the income tax was the answer to a populist demand: Let's go after the rich guys. We got into World War I, and they raised the rates and started taxing the rich. Then we got into World War II, and that's when they taxed everybody, because they just needed more revenue.

— T.R. Reid