Steven A. Bank (UCLA) presents The Golden Age of Tax Dodging: Celebrities, Hollywood, and the Publicity Effect at Temple today as part of its Faculty Colloquium Series:

In the 1950s, as one columnist recently pointed out, “the wealthiest people in the U.S. were not corporate executives or baseball players. . . . Rather, they were entertainers.” At a time when Roger Blough, the head of U.S. Steel, was making approximately $300,000, Frank Sinatra made nearly $4 million. Celebrities were income, rather than asset, rich, though, making them vulnerable to the sky-high marginal tax rates of the time, which exceeded 90 percent. Since they were already surrounded by teams of financial and tax advisors, it should not be surprising that when it came to tax dodging during this period, entertainers were on the cutting edge. Indeed, it is not a stretch to say that members of the entertainment industry either developed or were early adopters of many of the most common tax minimization techniques of the 20th century. Perhaps more significantly, celebrities helped to drive the demand for them by publicizing and normalizing them through the force of their celebrity status. 

By examining a sampling of the techniques celebrities employed, this chapter in my forthcoming book, High Rates and Low Taxes: Tax Dodging in Mid-Century America (under contract, Cambridge University Press) effectively offers a survey of the most prominent tax dodging moves of this era and explains how even in prosecuting celebrities and legislating against their tax maneuvers, the government managed to fuel the tax dodging movement.

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