I don't think it's actually a "tax dodge" because having the money donated to a nonprofit does limit what the money can be for and to the extent salaries are pa

I don't think it's actually a "tax dodge" because having the money donated to a nonprofit does limit what the money can be for and to the extent salaries are paid back to family members that's getting taxed anyway (theoretically they could be shifting it to lower tax brackets but when you look at current US tax rates it's not going to make much difference anyway). I think there's a real question of whether rich people should be able to get tax exemptions for donating massive amounts of money to nonprofits of their choice with no limit, but it's not a "scam" because Bill Gates is doing exactly the thing that the current tax code is intended to incentivize; he's not using some sort of complicated loophole to use the money for personal purposes while getting a tax exemption, he's just using it for charitable purposes that he chooses, exactly as intended. That said, personally I don't think it necessarily makes sense to say that someone should be able to e.g. choose to donate a billion dollars of income to an art museum and not get taxed when the tax revenue from that income if it were not made deductible (even if less than a billion dollars) could be used for potentially more important uses once you factor in marginal utility, etc. Framing it as a "scam" or "loophole" is somewhat misleading imo because it implies that rich people are somehow cheating the system, whereas in reality they are just using the system as intended, but it might actually be a bad system.