Ramit Sethi Calls Tax Breaks ‘Government Assistance’ for the Ultra-Wealthy — Is He Right?

©Ramit Sethi

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The 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act allowed states to restrict the purchase of candy, soda and other junk food with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funds. In 2026, the USDA reports that nearly half the states have approved such restrictions. 

Bestselling personal finance author, speaker and media personality Ramit Sethi sees a class-based double-standard in the new rules — and he used his own tax history to highlight the contrast.

What Does It Mean To Leech Off of the System? 

Sethi responded to the new regulations on X with this post: “Interesting that Americans love to debate whether poor people should be allowed to buy a Coke with their SNAP benefits, but nobody ever creates rules for me — the recipient of tens of millions of dollars of lifetime tax breaks — on what I can and cannot buy with my money.”

Does the “I Will Teach You to Be Rich” author and brand founder have a point, or is he just making noise for clicks? 

Certified tax specialist and enrolled agent Amit Maheshwari thinks it might be a little bit of both. 

“Sethi is partly right,” Maheshwari, a partner at the firm Taxx Resolution Inc., said. “However, it is a provocative headline meant to attract Instagram attention.”

Handouts for the Poor, Incentives for the Rich

Sethi is hardly the first public figure to note the stark gap between how society tends to view low-income people who receive benefits from programs like SNAP and the wealthy elite who leverage the tax code to pay as little as possible into the system that funds those programs. Social commentators like George Carlin were making similar points before Sethi was born. 

Maheshwari’s view is that there’s nothing wrong with the government using the tax code to incentivize certain behaviors, but that the most valuable incentives favor people of means.

“Real estate depreciation and cost segregation create and accelerate paper losses but offset real income, reducing taxes,” he said. “Under code 1031, the uber-rich keep deferring capital gains tax on their real estate investments, almost perpetually, as long as they keep investing in new property. The ultra-wealthy also create a step-up in basis of their wealth by utilizing tax code IRC 1014 and using efficient estate planning and trust creation techniques.”

The Loopholes Are There for the Taking — If You Can Afford Them

The tax provisions Maheshwari outlined are only a few that the rich use to reduce their tax obligations and, therefore, their contributions to programs like SNAP. 

“Other avenues, such as investments in Opportunity Zones and renewable energy credits, create similar tax breaks,” he said. 

However, those provisions are available to taxpayers of all incomes — technically. 

“Investments in real estate and tax breaks using these tax codes require access to capital, ownership of appreciating real estate and long-term investment horizons, which normally are not accessible to people with lesser means or just W-2 employees,” Maheshwari said. “These are essentially investments that ordinary folks do not have the education or means to invest in.”

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