Publishers Weekly
08/23/2021
Pulitzer winner Wessel (Red Ink) traces the concept of opportunity zones from their origin at a Washington insider dinner in 2013 in this trenchant exposé. The idea of opportunity zones, “struggling parts of the country” that can be economically revitalized by giving investors tax breaks, are the brainchild of Silicon Valley billionaire Sean Parker, Wessel explains: he built a “bipartisan coalition in Congress to write his idea into law,” which succeeded in 2017. Wessel notes the irony as struggling communities desperate for outside investment—such as Baltimore and Appalachia—are passed over by investors who favor more promising ventures. And a lack of restrictions, Wessel contends, has allowed wealthy investors their tax breaks without the renewal the program was designed for (as seen in an opportunity-zone-funded Ritz-Carlton residence in Downtown Portland). But Wessel does find some zones doing it right: SoLa Impact provides affordable housing to residents of South Los Angeles, for example. Wessel’s colorful, in-depth investigative reporting shines as he takes readers to an Opportunity Zone expo on the Las Vegas strip, behind the scenes of Washington, D.C., think tanks, and on the ground in West Coast communities. Comprehensive and shocking, this is an eye-opener. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
A must-read for anyone who wants to really understand how an idea can in time become a law—with the help of a large budget, skilled lobbying, and the support of a few key members of Congress. I thought I knew a bit about how Washington works, but I learned an enormous amount from David Wessel’s very carefully researched and extremely well written book.”—David M. Rubenstein, cofounder and co-executive chairman of The Carlyle Group and author of How to Lead
“In Only the Rich Can Play, David Wessel masterfully makes policy wonkery into a riveting story. A cautionary tale of good intentions gone bad, it is a must read, from Wall Street to Main Street.” —Arthur C. Brooks, professor, Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, and New York Times–bestselling author
“David Wessel is a Washington treasure, and anything he writes is a must-read as far as I’m concerned. In Only the Rich Can Play, Wessel marries the depth of his understanding of economics with his years of experience as a Washington reporter and his skill at storytelling. He traces the origins of the Opportunity Zone tax break from conception to birth and then shows how it actually works (or not) on the ground. This is both a great read and an important one because it shows those of us outside Washington how things really work there.” —Bryan Burrough, coauthor of Barbarians at the Gate and Forget the Alamo
“David Wessel has long been one of the keenest observers of the American economy. This book shows his remarkable ability to combine intellectual meat with compelling narrative. Many Silicon Valley moguls are politically clueless, but Sean Parker of Napster and Facebook managed to slip his real estate investment scheme—Opportunity Zones—into law, despite almost no support from traditional thought leaders. You should read this book if you want to understand how to get things done in Washington. You should read this book if you want to understand the most important new urban policy in a generation. You should read this book if you just want to be entertained by a terrific political yarn.”—Edward Glaeser, Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics, Harvard University
“Vegas, opulent parties, wine-filled dinners. . . . Not since the classic Showdown at Gucci Gulch has tax policy making been this much fun. But look beyond the vivid anecdotes and there’s an important and underappreciated story about a program that will cost the federal treasury billions while helping a fraction of the people Congress intended. Wessel weaves together on-the-ground reporting, the best data and evidence, and deep knowledge of the policy process to show how strong moral convictions, vast wealth, and a turbocharged media presence can run up against entrenched special interests and inadequate vetting. The result, as one interviewee says, is a missed opportunity indeed.” —Tracy Gordon, Urban Institute
“A fascinating and entertaining—albeit at times depressing and infuriating—story of how a major policy initiative came to be. . . . A lesson in how social policy in America should not be made, but too often is, and an explanation of why the rich always seem to win."—Melissa Kearney, Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics, University of Maryland
“If you want to understand how the US has ended up with a tax code that on paper is progressive but in practice is so regressive that the very wealthy pay virtually no tax, Only the Rich Can Play is the place to start. In his wry style, Wessel uses the story of a tax provision dreamed up by a tech billionaire to show what happens when good intentions and arrogance collide with our tax-avoidance-industrial complex.”—Paul Romer, New York University, Nobel laureate in Economics
“The real story of the Trump years is one you have never heard. Beneath all the outrage and the hysteria, the same old depressing familiar was chugging along all the time: billionaires designing innovative tax breaks for other billionaires, poor people being used as a moral excuse to cut the taxes of the rich. David Wessel tells us the story in its every glittering detail, and his title might well be the catch-phrase for our era: Only the Rich Can Play.”—Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter With Kansas? and The People, No
“A clearly articulated, maddening case study in how the rich get richer on the backs of the poor.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Wessel’s colorful, in-depth investigative reporting shines as he takes readers to an Opportunity Zone expo on the Las Vegas strip, behind the scenes of Washington, D.C., think tanks, and on the ground in West Coast communities. Comprehensive and shocking, this is an eye-opener.”—Publishers Weekly
“Intensively reported, meticulously detailed, and studded with colorful anecdotes and characters, the book ultimately concludes, wisely, that it is both too soon to tell and the signs are less than promising.”—Foreign Policy
“Wessel does a superb job…If you are interested in how money works in politics and the opportunities that the wealthy have to avoid paying taxes, you will find Only the Rich Can Play a gratifying (if maddening) book to read.”—Inside Higher Ed
“In a sobering reflection on how policy can go wrong, its backers spent too much time creating a policy to encourage the rich to invest and far too little learning the lessons of the past or listening to those in the communities their policies were supposed to benefit. A moral tale for wealthy do-gooders everywhere.”—Financial Times
“Only the Rich Can Play is an uncomfortable reminder that no matter how much you may appreciate an idea’s intellectual lineage or conceptual clarity, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. It deserves inclusion on political science syllabi as a case study in how a billionaire’s idea can flow from a Davos brainstorming session to Washington’s halls of power and become the law of the land.”—American Compass
“Only the Rich Can Play is the latest evidence that trickle-down investments don’t work in economic development. It also supports those who argue that the funds would be better used for education, infrastructure, and public health that benefit all employers.”—Public Seminar
“In his deeply-researched new book, Only The Rich Can Play, David Wessel tells the fascinating—and cautionary—tale of how that provision came to be and what it has wrought.”—TaxVox
“David Wessel’s Only the Rich Can Play: How Washington Works in the Gilded Age is sure to enter the pantheon of Washington, D.C., books that explain the complicated, exciting, and messy ways significant legal changes get through Congress. The book is in many ways a successor to Showdown at Gucci Gulch, a book that explains how D.C. really works. It does a better job than any book I can remember at showing how lobbying and the work of policy experts are linked in contemporary politics. Ideas and analysis play an important role in politics and thus an important role in lobbying.”—Niskanen Center
“I don’t think the title of the book does justice to this deeply reported portrait of the origins, implementation, and results of the Opportunity Zones tax loophole created by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. In fact, the book goes out of its way to treat a half-baked policy idea fairly.”—Stan Veuge, Senior Fellow, Economic Policy, American Enterprise Institute
“An interesting study of bi-partisanship gone awry.”—Michael Ettlinger
Library Journal
★ 10/01/2021
Wessel (economics, Brookings Inst.; In Fed We Trust) presents a detailed account of the Opportunity Zone (OZ) program, enacted by Congress in 2017, and a report on its results. The OZ program was largely the creation of Steve Parker, a founder of Facebook, who proposed that investors be given large tax breaks on capital gains in return for investing in low-income communities. Wessel shows how Parker and his allies sold politicians (Senator Tim Scott) and economists (Larry Summers; Edward Glaeser) on the idea. After OZ legislation passed in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, Wessel visited various cities including Portland, OR, and Baltimore to see its effects. He writes that some underserved people have benefited, for example through affordable housing, but some investments have gone to the rich rather than poor. Wessel concludes that investors in OZs have benefited from the tax break, but the program does not have sufficient safeguards to prevent abuse. VERDICT Wessel has done a great deal of research and writes a fast-paced but careful account that is a major contribution to the study of the political process; readers interested in political science and economics will gain a great deal from it. Highly recommended.—David Gordon, Ludwig von Mises Inst., Auburn, AL
Kirkus Reviews
2021-08-11
Want to expand a fortune? All it takes is a congressperson or two in the pocket, as this vivid account of gaming the political system amply demonstrates.
Brookings Institution economist Wessel opens with a 2013 dinner at an expensive D.C. restaurant in which a current Biden economic adviser and one from the previous administration broke bread with Sean Parker, the fallen but shameless founder of Napster and ousted first president of Facebook. Parker had two passions: to cure cancer and end poverty by making it possible for “very rich people to invest in left-behind parts of the country in exchange for a generous tax break.” Everyone Parker met warned him off trying to translate such a project into law—but, against the odds, he pulled it off by bagging politicos who passed a law in 2017 that created 8,764 “opportunity zones.” These allowed wealthy people to invest capital gains in poor census tracts and thereby lessen or eliminate their tax burden. Of course, in the Trump era, there was no oversight, and thus money went into projects that benefited the rich and areas that didn’t need economic spurring, such as rapidly gentrifying sections of the Bay Area and a Nevada industrial park that housed a Tesla plant. (One investor in the latter was Michael Milken, his name a byword for fraud, who was quite open in admitting that “he was buying land to take advantage of the tax break.”) Meanwhile, places where such tax breaks would have worked to the benefit of poor neighborhoods, such as Baltimore and Detroit, went underfunded even as the regulations got “consistently more taxpayer friendly.” Wessel allows that some investments did go to their intended targets, though most did not. Even so, opportunity zones are so popular that they’re unlikely to go away, since “once launched, government programs and tax breaks tend to persist.”
A clearly articulated, maddening case study in how the rich get richer on the backs of the poor.
