The New York Times reports that thanks to a com­pli­cated tax struc­ture, part­ners of the Black­stone Group will, over the course of 15 years, receive $1.1 bil­lion in tax deduc­tions for their IPO. That’s $198 mil­lion over what the part­ners will pay in taxes on the stock sale, mean­ing that they will not only avoid paying taxes on the IPO but will actu­ally earn a neg­a­tive tax of some $200 million.

Once you get past the shock of this fact, the most vexing part of the whole thing is that Blackstone’s neg­a­tive tax turns on an account­ing fic­tion known as good will, “the value of the intan­gi­ble assets, like a well-​known brand name, that are built up by a com­pany over time.” The NYT’s David Cay John­ston explains how they’ll do it:

Indi­vid­u­als who create good will cannot deduct it. But when good will is sold the new owners can [deduct it] because its value is assumed to erode. The Black­stone part­ners sold the good will from their left pocket to their right.

It’s a nice trick I don’t rec­om­mend trying on your next 1040: sell your­self some quan­tity of fading charm or falling beauty and take a deduc­tion for your future losses. But what won’t work for you will work for Black­stone, and with that bit of finan­cial leg­erde­main the Black­stone part­ners will actu­ally turn a profit off the U.S. Treasury.

It’s their busi­ness if the super-​rich want to get richer, but you’d think they could have the cour­tesy to leave the rest of us out of it. As it stands, for the next 15 years we the people will be sub­si­diz­ing the depre­ci­a­tion of Blackstone’s good will, an entity whose existence—especially of late—one has very good rea­sons to doubt.