inheritance estate tax

==

see inequality

see tax dodge

see trust fund

SEE TRUST FUND BABY

ROBT R 12 25 AN

...5. The fifth way to make more than a billion is to get the money from rich parents or relatives.

A new UBS report finds that a record number — 91 people — became billionaires in 2025 through inheritance. Their total bounty was almost $300 billion.

It’s the beginning of what’s expected to be the largest inter-generational wealth transfer in history, during which heirs will inherit at least $5.9 trillion over the next 15 years.

An estimated 45 percent of all wealth in America is inherited. That’s because, under U.S. tax law — which is itself largely a product of lobbying by the wealthy — the capital gains of one generation are wiped out when those assets are transferred to the next.

As Mitt Romney (remember him?) recently pointed out, had Elon Musk purchased his Tesla stock for, say, $1 billion and held it until his death, and if it were then worth $500 billion, he would never pay the 24 percent federal capital gains tax on the $499 billion profit. Under the current tax code, when Musk’s heirs inherit his stock, the assets will be treated as if the heirs purchased it for $500 billion. So no one will ever pay taxes on the $499 billion capital gain.

If unearned income were treated the same as earned income under the tax code, America’s non-working rich wouldn’t be billionaires. And if capital gains weren’t eliminated at death, many heirs wouldn’t be, either.

The good news is that Americans are becoming increasingly alarmed about the harms billionaires are inflicting on our system. A Harris poll released last month finds that over half of Americans (53 percent) believe that billionaires are threatening democracy.

In addition, a significant 71 percent of Americans believe there should be a wealth tax. And a majority believe there should be a cap on how much wealth a person can accumulate.

These schemes also threaten capitalism itself. The system doesn’t work when monopolies, insider trading, political payoffs, fraud, and large amounts of inherited wealth are rigging it. As the system loses public trust, it begins to unravel.

When and if sane and honest people ever again control the U.S. government, one of the first things they should do is enact a tax on large accumulations of wealth.

Also an end to the current rule that allows all capital gains to be erased when the owners of the capital die, thereby enabling heirs to inherit all the accumulated wealth tax-free.

Not the least, we must get big money out of politics — to end the bribes and corruption that have distorted capitalism for the benefit of a handful of people at the top. (Here’s a way to do it.)

*Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.*

===

an 12 24

The children of the richest families in the U.S. are well-known for spending their vast wealth on frivolous luxuries—constructing a replica of a medieval church on their acres of property, in the case of banking heir Timothy Mellon, or starting a brand of T-shirts describedby one critic as "terrible beyond your wildest imagination," as Wyatt Koch, nephew of Republican megadonors Charles and David, did.

But a reportreleased by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) on Thursday shows how "billionaire nepo babies" don't just waste their families' fortunes. They also benefit from "a rigged system" that allows them to "pass that wealth down over generations without being properly taxed–often without being taxed at all."

In addition, the heirs of the country's biggest fortunes spend vast sums "to elect politicians who protect their unearned wealth and manipulate the country's economy in their favor," said ATF.

Along with Mellon and Koch, the report profiles Samuel Logan of the Scripps media dynasty; Nicola Peltz-Beckham, daughter of billionaire investor Nelson Peltz; Gabrielle Rubenstein, whose family has made its fortune in private equity; and President-elect Donald Trump's son, Eric Trump.

The nepo babies are part of a small group of billionaire families in the U.S. who benefit from tax loopholes that ensure little of their immense wealth ever goes to benefit the public good.

At least 90 billionaires have passed away over the last decade, leaving their beneficiaries $455 billion in collective wealth.

But according to ATF, "$255 billion (56%) of that amount was likely entirely exempt from the capital gains tax because of a special break called 'stepped up basis.'"

"Trump and his allies in Congress are doing their donors' bidding by rigging the system in their favor and pushing a $4 trillion giveaway to wealthy elites and giant corporations."

Without loopholes included the stepped up basis tax cut, the current estate tax on billionaires and centimillionaires would yield enough revenue to fund universal childcare, preschool, and paid family leave for U.S. workers, with hundreds of billions of dollars left over, according to ATF's report.

The wealthy heirs profiled in the report and their families are some of the Republican Party's top donors—contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to candidates including Trump in the hopes of securing even more tax cuts.

Mellon, for example, is Trump's "biggest supporter, giving $140 million to a pro-Trump PAC in 2024 alone," reads the report.

A previous analysis by ATF found that as of late October, just 150 billionaire families had spent $1.9 billion on the 2024 elections.

As the Center for American Progress found earlier this year, Trump's plan to extend the tax cuts that he pushed through in 2017 would cost $4 trillion over the next decade.

"The vast wealth inherited by centuries-old billionaire families is staggering. While these heirs and their billions go undertaxed, enormous sums are squandered on lavish mansions, private jets, and vanity projects instead of funding crucial public investments," said ATF executive director David Kass. "In 2024, these billionaire families used their enormous wealth to make record-breaking political contributions to secure a GOP trifecta. Now, Trump and his allies in Congress are doing their donors' bidding by rigging the system in their favor and pushing a $4 trillion giveaway to wealthy elites and giant corporations—all while advocating for cuts to vital programs that working and middle-class Americans depend on."

The report calls for Congress to pass "proven, pragmatic proposals to unrig the tax system that enjoy high levels of popular support," such as the Ultra Millionaire Tax Actthat was proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) this year. The bill would tax fortunes between $50 million and $1 billion at 2% and wealth above $1 billion at $1 billion.

The small tax on enormous wealth would generate "a whopping $3 trillion over 10 years," said ATF.

The estate tax could also be "restored so that it can play a meaningful role in promoting fairness and equal opportunities" through the passage of theFor the 99.5% Act, which was introduced in 2023 by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.).

Under the bill, the estate tax exemption would be lowered to $7 million per couple and the current 40% flat rate would be replaced with a sliding scale that would charge higher rates as a family's wealth grows.

"None of these tax reforms would impoverish the ultra wealthy, nor even inconvenience them in any meaningful way–but they would reduce the concentration of wealth that is so corrosive to society," reads the report. "At the same time, they would raise trillions of dollars that could be used to reduce inequality and improve the lives of families that can only dream of the kind of security and opportunity enjoyed by the nation’s richest clans."

"And if rich families ever did need to tighten their belts a bit to pay their taxes," the report continues, "the economizing might begin by reducing the flow of money funding the extravagant lifestyles of America's Billionaire Nepo Babies."

===

note amplif fdbk

strict fr again?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/to-us-oligarchs-majority-views-on-taxing-the-rich-count-for-little/

noah b

With one political party entirely committed to expanding inequality, and the other divided on the issue, overwhelming public support and commonsense ethical commitments don’t carry much weight.

That’s how oligarchies consolidate. The wealthy horde power and wealth, then that power and wealth gives them the ability to shape institutions to further increase their power and wealth.

Yellen has had some successes in restraining wealthy and corporate power. She negotiated an international agreement with 136 countries to implement a global corporate minimum tax of 15 percent.

At some point, corruption stops being a bug in democracy and starts becoming a feature of oligarchy.

Has the US passed that threshold?

Based on the sweeping and effective resistance to commonsense solutions to reign in wealthy tax scofflaws, the answer is not encouraging.

Since the 1970s, the United States has become steadily and inexorably more economically unequal. According to Pew, upper income families have brought in a larger and larger share of total income.

US income inequality is the highest of all G7 nations. Its Gini coefficient is .434, well above second highest UK at .392.

In 1968, the top 20 percent of households earned 43 percent of national income. By 2018, the top 20 percent of households earned 52 percent.

In 1989, the richest 5 percent of families had 114 times as much wealth as families in the second poorest income tier. In 2016, they had 248times as much wealth.

In 2020, the 50 richest Americans had almost as much wealth as the poorest half of the US population.

This massive concentration of wealth is also a massive concentration of power. The wealthiest people have access to the best lawyers, the best tax attorneys and the most powerful politicians.

That means that it is very difficult for the government to restrain them, or to create a more equitable economy and society against their wishes.

That’s how oligarchies consolidate. The wealthy horde power and wealth, then that power and wealth gives them the ability to shape institutions to further increase their power and wealth. [amp fdbk]

An example of oligarchical power is billionaire tax evasion. A recent IRS study found that wealthy Americans conceal more than 20 percent of their earnings. They are able to do this because of complex accounting scams involving offshore tax shelters.

The lost tax costs the government at least $175 billion a year in revenue. The top 1 percent of earners are responsible for a third of unpaid federal taxes.

In addition to these straightforwardly illegal accounting tricks, the very wealthy also benefit from at least nominally legal loopholes.

For instance, wealthy people have many assets that increase in value over time, but they do not pay taxes on those assets until they sell them.

They can borrow against those assets without paying taxes, since again the assets aren’t considered income. Then, if they die before selling the assets, they can pass them on to their heirs using trusts and other accounting shenanigans to avoid the estate tax.

ProPublica called this strategy Buy, Borrow, Die. It’s a key method for hoarding generational wealth, and entrenching oligarchy.

The Biden administration, led by Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, have proposed strong measures to rein in billionaire corruption. In part, they want to restrain inequality. In part, they hope to fund other priorities like climate mitigation and anti-poverty measures in the administration’s Build Back Better infrastructure plan.

To address billionaire tax evasion, BBB included $80 billion to boost capacity and staff at the IRS. That would help make up for the steady budget-cuts under Republican administrations. Those have led to a 60 percent decrease in audits of taxpayers who earn more than $1 million. Biden said the investment would allow the IRS to collect $400 billion in taxes.

Biden, Yellen and Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden have also been pushing for a billionaire tax to force the very wealthy to pay taxes on the increased value of their assets.

This would strike at the heart of the oligarchic “Buy, Borrow, Die” lifestyle. It would force the ultra-wealthy to pay their fair share, like everyone else, every year, year after year.

Policies that prevent the rich from escaping a tax burden everyone has to pay should be easy to pass in a democracy. You’d think preventing billionaires from cheating on their taxes would be a popular policy.

And you’d be correct.

A 2019 poll, for example, showed that 76 percent of Americans agreed that the wealthiest should pay more in taxes. Proposals to tax income over $10 million at 70 percent — a huge increase over current rates — obtained more than 50 percent support.

In an oligarchy, though, public support doesn’t necessarily count for all that much.

A notorious 2015 study found that politicians were much more likely to listen to and follow the political preferences of economic elites than those of the less affluent.

You can see that playing out in the politics of billionaire taxation.

Build Back Better, which included the beefed-up IRS funding, was scuttled by millionaire West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, in large part, reportedly, because he was worried that poor parents would spend money on drugs.

A wealthy politician refused to enforce the law against billionaires because he was worried that poor people are natural criminals.

That is what you call class consciousness.

Wyden’s proposal to end “Buy, Borrow, Die” also failed after opposition from Manchin.It was of course opposed by Senate Republicans, whose main goal is to shovel as much money as possible to the rich in as short a time as possible.

Yellen has had some successes in restraining wealthy and corporate power. She negotiated an international agreement with 136 countries to implement a global corporate minimum tax of 15 percent. This would make it harder for businesses to escape tax burdens by moving their corporate offices. Congress still has to pass the treaty, but Yellen said she was confident they would do so.

The corporate minimum tax is a substantial achievement. But it’s also a small dam erected against the tsunami of inequality in the US.

With one political party entirely committed to expanding inequality, and the other divided on the issue, overwhelming public support and commonsense ethical commitments don’t carry much weight.

The wealthy have been expanding their power and influence for decades in the US. The result is that the US regularly chooses to make the rich richer rather than helping the poorest feed their children.

The outlook for change is likely to be even bleaker if Republicans recapture one or both legislative chambers in November.

Yellen and Biden are to be commended for fighting an ongoing rearguard action against corruption. But if government inability to restrain corruption is a feature of oligarchy, then the US is already well down a path that it is very difficult to retrace.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/robert-reich-there-are-only-5-ways-to-become-a-billionaire-and-none-of-them-involve-being-successful-in-free-market-capitalism

Billionaires are wailing that Elizabeth Warren’s and Bernie Sanders’s wealth tax proposals are attacks on free market capitalism.

Warren “vilifies successful people,” says Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase.

Rubbish. There are basically only five ways to accumulate a billion dollars, and none of them has to do with being successful in free market capitalism.

The first way is to exploit a monopoly.

Jamie Dimon is worth $1.6 billion. That’s not because he succeeded in the free market. In 2008 the government bailed out JPMorgan and four other giant Wall Street banks because it considered them “too big to fail.”

That bailout is a hidden insurance policy, still in effect, with an estimated value to the big banks of $83 billion a year. If JPMorgan weren’t so big and was therefore allowed to fail, Dimon would be worth far less than $1.6 billion.

What about America’s much-vaulted entrepreneurs, such as Jeff Bezos, now worth $110 billion? You might say Bezos deserves this because he founded and built Amazon.

But Amazon is a monopolist with nearly 50 percent of all e-commerce retail sales in America, and e-commerce is one of the biggest sectors of retail sales. In addition, Amazon’s business is protected by a slew of patents granted by the U.S. government.

If the government enforced anti-monopoly laws, and didn’t give Amazon such broad patents,Bezos would be worth far less than $110 billion.

A second way to make a billion is to get insider information unavailable to other investors.

Hedge-fund maven Steven A. Cohen, worth $12.8 billion, headed up a hedge fund firm in which, according to a criminal complaint filed by the Justice Department, insider trading was “substantial, pervasive, and on a scale without known precedent in the hedge fund industry.” Nine of Cohen’s present or former employees pleaded guilty or were convicted. Cohen got off with a fine, changed the name of his firm, and apparently is back at the game.

Insider trading is endemic in C-suites, too. SEC researchers have found that corporate executives are twice as likely to sell their stock on the days following their own stock buyback announcements as they are in the days leading up to the  announcements.

If government cracked down on insider-trading, hedge-fund mavens and top corporate executives wouldn’t be raking in so much money.

A third way to make a billion is to buy off politicians.

The Trump tax cut is estimated to save Charles and the late David Koch and their Koch Industries an estimated $1 to $1.4 billion a year, not even counting their tax savings on profits stored offshore and a shrunken estate tax. The Kochs and their affiliated groups spent some $20 million lobbying for the Trump tax cut, including political donations. Not a bad return on investment.

If we had tough anti-corruption laws preventing political payoffs, the Kochs and other high-rollers wouldn’t get the special tax breaks and other subsidies that have enlarged their fortunes.

The fourth way to make a billion is to extort big investors.

Adam Neumann conned JP Morgan, SoftBank, and other investors to sink hundreds of millions into WeWork, an office-sharing startup. Neumann used some of the money to buy buildings he leased back to WeWork and to enjoy a lifestyle that included a $60 million private jet. WeWork never made a nickel of profit.

A few months ago, after Neumann was forced to disclose his personal conflicts of interest, WeWork’s initial public offering fell apart and the company’s estimated value plummeted. To salvage what they could, investors paid him over $1 billion to exit the board and give up his voting rights. Most other WeWork employees were left holding near-worthless stock options. Thousands were set to be laid off.

If we had tougher anti-fraud laws, Neumann and others like him wouldn’t be billionaires.

The fifth way to be a billionaire is to get the money from rich parents or relatives.

**About 60 percent of all the wealth in America today is inherited**, according to estimates by economist Thomas Piketty and his colleagues. That’s because, under U.S. tax law – which is itself largely a product of lobbying by the wealthy – the capital gains of one generation are wiped out when those assets are transferred to the next, and the estate tax is so tiny that fewer than 0.2 percent of estates were subject to it last year.

If unearned income were treated the same as earned income under the tax code, America’s non-working rich wouldn’t be billionaires. And if capital gains weren’t eliminated at death, many heirs wouldn’t be, either.

Capitalism doesn’t work well with monopolies, insider-trading, political payoffs, fraud, and large amounts of inherited wealth. Billionaires who don’t like Sanders’s and Warren’s wealth tax should at least support reforms that end these anti-capitalist advantages.

6 22 pro pub

yass

...That suggests that Yass’ adult children, two of whom work at Susquehanna, stand to someday inherit multibillion-dollar fortunes — tax-free.

Over decades of TV appearances and speeches promoting his libertarian gospel, Milton Friedman often liked to say he was “in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.” Friedman died in 2006. Today, Yass, who reveres the economist, is trying to bring Friedman’s ideas to fruition.

Yass has not only worked assiduously to lower his own taxes but has poured millions into political efforts to eliminate them for his class. In recent years he has given $32 million to the anti-tax stalwart Club for Growth. This money paid for TV ads attacking candidates who were seen as wobbly on Friedman’s tax-cuts-anytime-anywhere philosophy.

In Pennsylvania, where Yass is the richest person in the state and a kingmaker in local politics, his favored candidates have shaped tax policy. He is a longtime financial patron of aDemocratic state senator,Anthony Williams, one of the creators of a pair of tax credits that allow companies to slash their state tax bills if they give money to private and charter schools. Susquehanna is, in turn, a major user of the tax credits. (Williams did not respond to requests for comment.)

The programs limited the state tax credits a single company could receive, but Yass and the others found a way to sidestep the limits. Yass, Dantchik and Greenberg simply applied for the tax credits through individual companies each had formed, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 2015. In all, the credits have saved Yass and the others at least $53 million in state taxes, records show.

Yass’ views on taxes, along with another stance inspired by Friedman, school privatization, seem to have informed his shifting opinion of Donald Trump.

Yass had opposed Trump during the 2016 Republican presidential primary, instead donating large sums to Rand Paul of Kentucky, the de facto leader of the party’s libertarian wing, and to Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson.

A week after Trump won the presidency that November, Yass took the stage at a theater in Philadelphia. Even though Trump had not been his candidate, Yass seemed to relish the long-odds election win, joking that those who “didn’t like Tuesday’s results” could move to Canada.

He used the rest of his remarks at the event, part of a local TED Talk-style series, to promote his passion for charter and private schools and attack Philadelphia teachers.:{ “All we ever hear about is how underpaid they are and how abused they are,” Yass }:{. “}::{Well, the shocking fact is that the average school teacher in Philadelphia with benefits makes $117,000 a year.”[acknowledged](https://youtu.be/JOVf5nHSOsI)acknowledged that a large chunk of that figure was from pension and health care costs. (That year, Yass made $1.26 billion, before benefits.)}:

Over the next four years, Trump delivered both a historic tax cut for the rich and an education secretary who was a champion of charter schools.

Yass has since backed a range of pro-Trump candidates. In Pennsylvania, he has poured money into this year’s Republican effort to take the open gubernatorial seat, which many expect, if successful, will lead to an abortion ban in the state. The Club for Growth also backed a losing candidate for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat, Kathy Barnette, whose campaign centered on her hard-line opposition to abortion, even in cases of rape. Yass is the second biggest donor to the Club (which did not return ProPublica’s requests for comment).

He is also the largest donor to the Rand Paul-affiliated Protect Freedom PAC,giving $2.5 million of his more than $12 million in recent donations just days after the 2020 election. The group’s website says of Democrats: “Of course, they stole the election.”

Yass is looking to harness discontent with public schools during the pandemic to push privatization of the system. He has given $15 million as the sole funder of a political action committee, the School Freedom Fund, that says “school closures, mask mandates, critical race theory, and more” have created “a unique opportunity to promote School Choice as the structural solution to dramatically improve education in America.”

If Yass came to politics motivated by his libertarian ideology, he now has an acute material reason — beyond taxes — to have a voice in Washington.

Late in the Trump administration, Susquehanna’s prize investment came under threat. President Trump announced on July 31, 2020, that he was considering banning TikTok in the United States. (Backers of the ban cited national security concerns over Americans’ private data being controlled by the Chinese firm behind the app, ByteDance.) Susquehanna's multibillion-dollar stake in ByteDance accounts for a major part of Yass’ fortune.

There’s no record of Yass having given to Trump before. But on Aug. 4, 2020, just a few days after the president’s TikTok announcement, Yass gave $5 million to the Club for Growth.Two days later, the group deviated from its normal practice of funding congressional races and announced an ad campaign in the presidential race: $5 million against Joe Biden. The group didn’t mention Yass, but the ads attacked Biden on Yass’ pet issue, charter schools. Later that month, Yass gave the group another $5 million, and more ads ran against Biden.

At the same time, Trump and other administration officials were personally involved in trying to broker a deal to avoid finalizing the TikTok ban. At one point in September, Trump publicly announced his support for a deal in which U.S. companies would buy stakes in ByteDance and a new board would be formed. Among the proposed members of the board: Dantchik, Yass’ partner at Susquehanna.

It’s not clear if Yass or Dantchik talked to the White House about the deal, which ultimately fell through. Courts later blocked the proposal to ban the app.

Yass hasn’t spoken much publicly about how he thinks about his engagement in politics. A rare glimpse came after the Jan. 6 riot, when a Philadelphia political activist named Laura Goldman emailed Yass to question his donations to the Club for Growth. One of the candidates the group backed, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., had objected to certifying the presidential election results just days earlier.

“To be clear — I don’t think the election was stolen,” Yass responded in a Jan. 15, 2021, email, first reported by the Guardian. “I gave the club money a year ago. Do you think anyone knew Hawley was going to do that? Sometimes politicians deceive their donors.”

Yass appears to have overcome any doubts about the Club for Growth, which has continued to back candidates who say the election was stolen.

Since he sent that email, he has given the group another $5.5 million.

an 4 22

Whenever progressive Democrats talk about billionaires, it’s in the soft tones of fairness. Men like Warren Buffet and Elon Musk, we are told, should pay proportionally what normal non-billionaire people pay. The debate is steeped in the inoffensive language of “their fair share.”

The debate is backwards.

Instead of starting with “their fair share,” we should start with a question fundamental to every democracy that’s existed, to wit:

Should billionaires exist?

Should their influence be legal?

Billionaires are not just very obscenely rich. With their wealth comes planetary power.Their decisions affect billions and billions of people, who in turn have no say on whether those decisions should be made.

Why should a democratic republic such as America, which claims to hold power to account – which must hold power to account to survive as a democratic republic – tolerate the existence of billionaires.

We should ask.

We should also awaken to the truth.

We are accountable to them.

Billionaires tolerate the American people and their belief that they are the ultimate sovereigns. It serves their interests for the American people to believe they are more powerful than they actually are.

Are we accountable to them?

Yes.

The American tax code has long been designed to ensure that unaccountable planetary power wins when it’s heads, wins when it’s tails. A democratic republic allowing the existence of such a powerful parasitic class is a democratic republic surviving rather than thriving.

That’s why the debate is backwards.

A debate among progressive Democrats over the question of whether the very obscenely rich should pay their fair share has been settled before it started. It’s a debate the very obscenely rich already win.

We should instead recognize the very real danger billionaires pose to our republic. We should assess how much risk we’re willing to tolerate. How much should be legal, how much illegal? Only then should “their fair share” come into play. It’s fairness as a hedge against systemic risk.

It’s fairness so the people may be free.

To learn more about our tax code, and how upside down, backwards and prolapsed it is, I talked to Amy Hanauer. She’s the director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. She said that, “We do not have to accept a false message of scarcity. Billionaires and big corporations grew much more profitable even in a pandemic.

“We can pay for a better country.”

What is it that normal people should understand about the United States tax code that most normal people do not?

Taxes are essential to providing us with things we need, as families, as communities and as a planet. We can use the tax code to make sure everyone has good schools, to make sure working-class kids can afford college, to have resources to construct affordable housing.

But we can also use the tax code to have the resources necessary for the transition to a clean energy economy, to address racial and economic inequity and to make sure public employees are well-paid.

There are ways to raise revenue that raise resources from rich people and corporations. But unfortunately, the US does far too little to make sure that wealthy people and corporations pay their fair share.

My colleagues at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy did a report last year. It found that 55 profitable Fortune 500 corporations paid absolutely nothing in federal corporate income tax in 2020.

Zero.

A whole bunch of other big profitable corporations paid more than zero but less than half the corporate rate (21 percent).

The big economic legislation that passed the House last year, the Build Back Better Act, addressed this by putting in place a 15 percent minimum corporate tax for the very largest and most profitable corporations. Unfortunately, that bill is stalled in the Senate.

Letting corporations or the very wealthy pay less than their fair share is a choice. It's not a choice that most people agree with. It's also not a choice that most other wealthy democracies make.

In 2019, the most recent year for which data are available, the US collected revenue equal to 25 percent of its gross domestic product(25 percent of its total economic output). Most OECD countries collect more than 34 percent. Only a handful of OECD countries collect less revenue as a share of their economies than the United States. They are all small: Costa Rica, Turkey, Ireland, Chile, Columbia and Mexico.

What can the Treasury do about tax avoidance on its own?

First, to address the enormous problems with our tax code, we need legislation. Things the administration can do without Congress are not a substitute for passing tax reform, which Senator Manchin has said he wants to pass, which Senator Schumer wants to pass, which the House has passed, and which President Biden wants to pass. And not incidentally, which is incredibly popular with the American people.

That said, there are things that the Biden administration will have to do whether the Congress passes something or not.

The Trump administration expanded tax breaks for corporations far beyond what the 2017 law allowed. These regulatory excesses gave corporations and the rich even larger tax breaks than the law did.

Many corporations have admitted they used the expansive interpretation from the Trump Treasury to get bigger breaks.

A second big thing is that when corporations publish their financial disclosures, they are required to list tax breaks they think the IRS is likely to deny. But we found that big companies keep billions in breaks that they had admitted would not withstand scrutiny, simply since the clock runs out before the underfunded IRS has time to investigate.

The IRS should direct more resources to dealing with that.

Another important option is that we don't always know exactly how corporations are avoiding taxes. The IRS could require companies to disclose that. This would help us identify how to make the law better able to address tax avoidance.

So much of the tax code burdens people who work. Shouldn't the tax code burden the people who own and collect rents?

Yes.

One of the big problems with our tax code is that we have a special,lower rate on income from capital gains (which you get when you sell an expensive asset, like stocks or a house, at a higher price than what you paid for it.)

It doesn't make sense to tax earnings from wealth at a lower rate than earnings from work.

But even worse is that the wealthiest people can accumulate wealth without selling their assets, and then can pass that wealth onto their heirs at the new value without anyone ever paying taxes on it.

This is called "stepped-up basis.”

The Biden administration included a fix to that in the BBB plan.But after a heavy lobbying effort led by moneyed interests, the provision was removed before the House committee sent the bill to the floor.

The reforms that did pass the House would raise a lot of revenue and raise them from the wealthiest people and corporations. But long term, we should also go back and revisit these good ideas.

Can you talk about the alleged link between low tax and high growth? That was a very potent argument in the past. Now?

The United States had its strongest decades of economic growth at a time when our tax rates were much higher than today.And that's not surprising. Things that led to high growth required public spending.

In the middle of the 20th century, we put a lot of national resources into helping people become much more educated.

Rates of high school and college completion rose in part because of more spending on K-12 schools, of Pell grants that help regular people pay for college and of state funding to public universities.

We also put resources into improving our national infrastructure, like the interstate. That helped companies get products out to market.

Both of these investments made us much more productive.

Today, we have different imperatives to make our economy more productive but we have nevertheless been underinvesting.

We need to put resources into greening our economy, which would reduce the pace of climate change but also make us more resilient in the face of climate disasters, which are going to be with us.

And we have let inequality – both economic and racial – skyrocket. The result is that many working-class people of all races are left behind.

Addressing both of those things will take public resources but will make us much more economically competitive in the long term.

Did all that growth cause inflation in the 1970s?

Inflation is complicated.

But a lot of rising costs as a result of current inflation could be managed by passing BBB, which would reduce the cost of childcare and health care, two of the biggest costs families face.

Explain please.

For most people, housing, childcare and healthcare are among their biggest costs. BBB has spending that would address all of those, making them more affordable. If we could hold down costs for those items, that would do a lot to keep inflation in check.

We are a very wealthy country.

We do not have to accept a false message of scarcity. Billionaires and big corporations grew much more profitable even in a pandemic.

We can pay for a better country. We have the resources.

We can afford to make college affordable. We can invest in our little kids so their parents can work. And we can and must invest to take on climate chaos. None of us will be protected from it if we don't.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/billionaire/

comm dr

over the next few decades, the richest American families could avoid paying about $8.4 trillion in taxes, or more than four times the cost of the stalled Build Back Better package, according to a report released Wednesday.

The Americans for Tax Fairness report—entitled Dynasty Trusts: Giant Tax Loopholes that Supercharge Wealth Accumulation—urges Congress to fix the federal tax code to address dynastic wealth.

The new analysis details how loopholes have made the payment of estate, gift, and generation-skipping taxes—collectively called wealth-transfer taxes—effectively optional for the "ultrawealthy" and thereby accelerate the "accumulation of dynastic wealth."

"Ultrarich families use dynasty trusts—the term for a variety of wealth-accumulating structures that remain in place for multiple generations—to ensure their fortunes cascade down to children, grandchildren, and beyond undiminished by wealth-transfer taxes," the report explains.

Some U.S. states, such as South Dakota, have even changed their laws on dynasty trusts to attract wealthy residents, as Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy highlighted last year.

The new report notes that U.S. lawmakers aren't planning to address the issue, even if the Senate passes a version of a House-approved package:

The Build Back Better (BBB) legislation now before Congress—otherwise a vehicle for significant progressive tax reform—does nothing to directly reverse this toxic accumulation of dynastic wealth. Moreover, some dynasty trust reforms that were included in the bill passed by the House Ways and Means Committee in September 2021 were stripped out before the House voted on the measure in November.

The BBB bill needs full support from Senate Democrats to pass. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)—one of the primary reasons the legislation hasn't reached President Joe Biden's desk—said Tuesday that it is "dead."

However, Americans for Tax Fairnessstill uses the whittled-down BBB package to illustrate just how much money wealthy Americans can hoard for their families in the years ahead thanks to the U.S. tax system.

"The tax savings for the richest families could be about $8.4 trillion over the next 24 years or so if the current 40% estate tax rate remains in place," the report states. "That's the equivalent of more than four Build Back Better plans costing $1.75 trillion each over 10 years."

The report adds that "about half of the $8.4 trillion is equivalent to the cost of the expanded child tax credit, which was included in the House-passed BBB bill and is estimated to reduce childhood poverty by 40%, for 24 years at $160 billion a year." [twt]

"This hoarding of wealth is inexcusable," declared the report's principal author, Bob Lord, who practiced estate law for 30 years before joining Americans for Tax Fairness as tax counsel.

"The BBB legislation now before the U.S. Senate should be amended to close loopholes in the three components of America's wealth transfer tax system: the estate, gift, and generation-skipping tax," he asserted. "Effective reforms have already been developed—all that's needed is for Congress to recognize the urgency to act now."

The group's new analysis and call for action come after Americans for Tax Fairness estimated last month that the 10 wealthiest billionaires in the United States have become approximately $1 billion richer collectively every day of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Wednesday's report contains a warning about that group of ultra-billionaires, mentioning by name Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk of Telsa and SpaceX.

"As much as familiar fortunes have blossomed in the low-regulation, low-tax, wealth-worshiping environment of the previous 40 years," the report says, "the next 40 and beyond could see the rise of economic dynasties that will make the old money look small."

Along with closing dynasty-trust tax loopholes, Americans for Tax Fairness urges reforms that would "curb the year-to-year accumulation of wealth in existing trusts." Specifically, it calls for a new income-tax bracket "on undistributed trust income in excess of $250,000 that is five percentage points higher than the maximum income-tax bracket for individuals."

Noting a proposal from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the group also encourages U.S. lawmakers to "impose an annual 2% wealth tax on the portion of a dynasty trust's holdings that exceed $50 million, and an additional 1% on dynasty trust accumulations in excess of $1 billion."

"The choice is clear," according to the report. "We can fix our broken estate and gift tax system and stop the concentration of an ever-larger share of America's wealth inside enormous dynasty trusts, or we can trust our democracy to a handful of trillionaire trust fund babies."

"Fortunately, we know what needs to be done," the report concludes. "The sole remaining challenge is to summon the courage to stand up to the holders of dynastic wealth and their enablers."

https://kpfa.org/episode/economic-update-november-19-2021/

1 trillion hid in south dakota

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/south-dakota/

no lnx twt

How 'insanely corrupt' South Dakota became a magnet for the wealth-hoarding megarich

Brett Wilkins and Common Dreams October 06, 2021

Experts on the wealth-hoarding strategies and subterfuges of the world's superrich are weighing in this week on why "billionaires love South Dakota" after a bombshell report revealed that the Republican-led state is a leading global destination for plutocratic tax cheats.

One of the biggest revelations in the Pandora Papers—a gargantuan cache of nearly 12 million documents revealing the hidden wealth and secret dealings of hundreds of the world's wealthiest people, published Sunday by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)—is just how much of a fortune-magnet South Dakota has become.

Drawn by low taxes and some of the nation's most generous trust laws, "shady billionaires from around the world are going to South Dakota," said Chuck Collins, author of The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions, and co-editor of Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).

As a result, the Mount Rushmore State "now rivals Switzerland, Panama, the Cayman Islands, and other famous tax havens as a premier venue for the international rich seeking to protect their assets from local taxes or the authorities," The Guardian reports.

Writing for Common Dreams Monday, Collins further explained:

Findings suggest that South Dakota has sheltered billions in wealth linked to wealthy individuals previously accused of serious financial crimes and labor violations. Two examples: Brazilian orange juice baron Horst Happel was fined $88 million in 2016 for underpaying his workers. In 2017, he moved substantial wealth to a trust in South Dakota. Carlos Morales Troncoso was the former vice president of the Dominican Republic. He ran a sugar company called Central Romana... that was accused of human rights violations. He set up trusts for his daughters in the Bahamas that were moved, after his death, to South Dakota.

Vehicles including granter-attained annuity trusts (GRATs) and so-called "dynasty trusts"—through which wealth can be sequestered for generations, even centuries—attract the über-rich to South Dakota by design.

Suzanne Garment, author of Scandal: The Culture of Mistrust in American Politics, wrote for NBC News Tuesday that "spurred by economic need," South Dakota has become "a leader in abolishing the rule against perpetuities—the old doctrine that limits the lifespan of a trust. One version of the rule says a trust must vest—that is, it must distribute its assets—within a stated amount of time."

"But not in South Dakota," she continued. "In South Dakota today, a trust can last, well, forever. The state couples this permissive regime with strict secrecy. As opposed to records in states like New York, court documents relating to South Dakota trusts are permanently private: Even the existence of such a trust is not public."

"As a result, it is virtually impossible to discover who has established a South Dakota trust, who benefits from it, or whether legal challenges to it have been filed," Garment added.

Collins is calling on Congress to address the issue.

"Lawmakers should act at the federal level to shut down or discourage the formation of dynasty trusts and GRATs for the purposes of tax avoidance and dynastic succession," he said. "Actions could include the passage of a federal 'rule against perpetuities,' banning certain trust arrangements, and taxing income and wealth in trusts."

South Dakota isn't the only place in the United States where the rich are hiding their treasures. Other U.S. states named in the Pandora Papers include Delaware, Florida, Nevada, and Texas.

"The world is going to be looking at us differently after the Pandora Papers," said Collins. "They're going to see that the United States is the weak link now in the system of global financial transparency."

https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/oil-spill/

pro publ

Series: The Secret IRS Files

Inside the Tax Records of the .001%

After the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig exploded in 2010, environmentalists surveying the damage in the Gulf of Mexico came upon a mystery. The water had oil slicks that, because of the currents, couldn’t have originated from the site of the notorious accident.

With the help of satellite imagery, they figured out that oil was leaking from a different spill, a six-year-old disaster the public knew almost nothing about. In September 2004, Hurricane Ivan had swept the legs out from under a 40-story oil-drilling platform operated by a company called Taylor Energy, causing a leak that continues to this day. It is the longest-running — and by one estimate, the largest — U.S. oil spill ever recorded, a contentious saga that prompted a recent “60 Minutes” segment.

It’s been an environmental nightmare for the region — but a massive tax bonanza for Phyllis Taylor, the owner of Taylor Energy and the fallen rig.

According to ProPublica’s analysis of a secret trove of tax data, from 2005 to 2018, Taylor took in some $444 million in income, most of it from wages, interest, dividends and capital gains, and didn’t pay a cent in federal income tax.

That’s in significant measure because she was able to transform money her company was compelled to spend cleaning up the oil spill into a perfectly legal nine-figure tax write-off for herself.

Representatives for Taylor, now 80, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Taylor is part of a set of ultrawealthy Americans who manage to avoid federal income taxes for years on end by using their businesses or leisure interests to throw off enough deductions to offset the millions or even billions of dollars they make. We’ve nicknamed the group the biggest losers. Taylor’s story shows just how lucrative it can be to be a member of that particular club.

Patrick Taylor, Phyllis Taylor’s husband, founded Taylor Energy in 1979. He would eventually become the richest man in Louisiana and enjoyed the sort of lifestyle that went with the title. He raced speedboats on the Mississippi, rode bulls in rodeos and skydived more than 500 times. But he often said he preferred to be known for his role in advocating for the creation of a beloved state program that provided scholarships to Louisiana colleges and universities.

Taylor Energy operated out of an ornate four-story mansion in New Orleans, off Lee Circle, where a statue of Robert E. Lee stood until 2017. Female employees were not allowed to wear pants, and employees addressed their superiors as “sir” or “ma’am.” Patrick’s office had hand-painted blue-and-white silk wallpaper from a Russian palace, while a nearby dining room featured marble fountains from an 18th-century French chateau. Rooms were named after Ronald Reagan and the British naval hero Admiral Horatio Nelson.

Phyllis cut an unusual figure in the world of brash wildcatters. She started out in the business working for another Louisiana oilman, sometimes being mistaken for his coffee-bearing assistant before he surprised the men in the room by announcing she was his attorney. She married Patrick Taylor in 1964 and served on the board of directors of Taylor Energy while he ran the company.

Deemed the “gentle dove” of Louisiana for her philanthropy, Phyllis Taylor supported local education and art institutions, as well as housing for the homeless. She loved to travel, and in an interview with Condé Nast Traveler, extolled the joys of circumnavigating the world: “The difference between a short cruise and a world cruise is night and day, storm and calm, fleeting thought and thoughtfulness. With an extended cruise you absorb the lifestyle of life at sea; with the great advantage of having a crew and staff that treats you like royalty.” A frequent hunter, Taylor proudly displayed the skin and head of a leopard she shot in Zambia.

The year Ivan hit changed Phyllis Taylor’s life. A couple of months after the hurricane, her husband died at age 67. At 63, she took over the company.

Deaths create a spectacular tax boon for the wealthy, what some experts consider one of the largest loopholes in the code.

Taylor Energy had ballooned in value in the 25 years since its founding. If Patrick Taylor, who controlled the vast majority of the company, had sold it while he was alive, the Taylors would have owed a huge sum in capital gains tax. But all of that value disappeared at death for the purposes of taxes thanks to a widely decried provision of the code that will cost the U.S. Treasury more than $500 billion in lost taxes over the next decade. Phyllis inherited the company and became the wealthiest woman in Louisiana, worth an estimated $1.6 billion. There’s no estate tax for property transferred to a spouse.

In 2008, four years after Taylor Energy became aware of the spill, the company had yet to clean it up. Taylor decided she wanted out of the business. She sold all of the company’s oil rigs and other assets, except for the damaged rig, to two South Korean entities. Taylor, who owned about 95% of the company, according to her former CEO, received close to $1.2 billion of the roughly $1.25 billion price tag.

Yet Taylor was legally allowed to portray the sale to the IRS in a very different light — and that in turn depended on the fact that the law allows owners of private companies a lot of leeway in determining the value of their assets. Since Taylor was inheriting the company tax-free, she and her advisors had every reason to assign it a high initial value, because that would mean that when she later sold the assets, the high value would minimize or eliminate the gain on paper. “When property is transferred between spouses at death, there’s a tax incentive to aggressively value it on the high end,” said Gregg Polsky, a tax law professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, who has been retained as a consultant to ProPublica.

Taylor’s tax records suggest that’s what happened. Taylor did not record a gain on the sale of her company. In fact, she was able to report a loss of $211 million.

It’s difficult for outsiders to value a private company. But a former company insider said Taylor Energy was sold at a premium. “I did the valuation. I know what the assets were worth and know what we sold them for. We did not take a loss. Period,” John Pope, Taylor Energy’s former CEO, told ProPublica.

The upshot of the claimed loss was that Taylor paid no federal income tax in a year when she realized an enormous gain from the sale. She even got a remarkable extra goodie: refunds on $30 million in taxes she’d paid in previous years.

After the 2008 sale, what was left of Taylor Energy was devoted to one thing only, cleaning up the spill. The company had professed to be trying to plug the leaking oil well but seemed to make no progress.

A few months after the sale, the federal agency that oversees drilling in the Gulf negotiated an agreement that required the company to create a $666 million trust to cover the cost of the cleanup.

That was a lot of money — more than half of the proceeds from the company’s sale — but it came with a silver lining. Because Taylor Energy was set up as a sole proprietorship, its income and losses flowed through to Phyllis’ personal taxes. She could write off the costs of the cleanup against her own income.

It may be surprising that the costs of cleaning up an environmental disaster are tax-deductible. But such write-offs are legal, qualifying as “ordinary and necessary” business expenses. By contrast, fines and penalties are not deductible. Oil giant BP was able to deduct most of the settlement it reached with the government over the Deepwater Horizon spill because much of it went to address the environmental calamity, rather than to penalties for wrongdoing.

Such deductions are unobtainable for executives or shareholders at publicly traded corporations, where only the company gets to deduct the expenses.

It took years for the extent of the spill to become known. Taylor disclosed almost nothing about the accident and fought public records requests. The reality unspooled thanks to the persistence of environmental groups, investigative reporting, and revelations from a dizzying array of suits and countersuits.

In the years after it established the cleanup trust, Taylor Energy claimed that it could not have foreseen such an accident and that stopping the leak was technologically impossible. In 2012, the Coast Guard finally ordered Taylor to install a dome to contain the leak, but three years later, when Taylor Energy settled a lawsuit that forced it to start publicly disclosing more about its efforts, the company had not even finished the design.

According to a later review by the Coast Guard, Taylor Energy was “obstinate, difficult to deal with and verbally combative,” and preferred “to employ stall tactics over cooperation with an intention to confuse, delay or misdirect” the government.

In 2015, The Associated Press revealed that both Taylor and the government had dramatically underestimated the volume of the leak. The Coast Guard released a new estimate, much higher than its previous ones and 20 times the roughly 4 gallons a day Taylor was claiming. In a lawsuit, a federal expert put it higher still, estimating the spill to be up to 29,400 gallons a day. That would mean that starting in 2004, more oil spilled into the Gulf from Taylor Energy’s rig than the estimated 130 million gallons that gushed into it as a result of BP’s Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.

For more than a decade, Taylor Energy has launched a series of legal actions against the government to try to recoup at least a portion of the money in the trust or to end its cleanup obligations, saying it has done all that it could. The company has come up empty every time. Rather than put resources into fixing the problem, Taylor has been “putting all of its money and efforts into fighting the cleanup,” said Brettny Hardy, a senior attorney for Earthjustice, an environmental group.

Today the oil is still flowing at a rate of about 1,000 gallons a day. A protective dome, finally installed by a contractor the Coast Guard hired after losing faith in Taylor, contains the leak.

Taylor has weathered all of this remarkably well. She remains known as a great benefactor to her city and state. Praising her philanthropy, the U.S. Marine Corps gave her honorary marine status in 2013, and The Times-Picayune granted her its “Loving Cup” award in 2016.

The combination of the loss on the sale of the company and the expenses from the cleanup meant Taylor did not pay any income taxes from 2005 through 2018. At the end of 2018, her reserve pool of losses exceeded $330 million, making it a distinct possibility that she would never have to pay income taxes again.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/erik-prince/

Series: The Secret IRS Files

Inside the Tax Records of the .001%

It's well known, at least among tax lawyers and accountants for the ultrawealthy: The estate tax can be easily avoided by exploiting a loophole unwittingly created by Congress three decades ago. By using special trusts, a rarefied group of Americans has taken advantage of this loophole, reducing government revenues and fueling inequality.

There is no way for the public to know who uses these special trusts aside from when they've been disclosed in lawsuits or securities filings. There's also been no way to quantify just how much in estate tax has been lost to them, though, in 2013, the lawyer who pioneered the use of the most common one — known as thegrantor retained annuity trust, or GRAT — estimated they may have cost the U.S. Treasury about $100 billion over the prior 13 years.

As Congress considers cracking down on GRATs and other trusts to help fund President Joe Biden's domestic agenda, a new analysis by ProPublica based on a trove of tax information about thousands of the wealthiest Americans sheds light on just how widespread the use of special trusts to dodge the estate tax has become.

More than half of the nation's 100 richest individuals have used GRATs and other trusts to avoid estate tax, the analysis shows. Among them: former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg; Leonard Lauder, the son of cosmetics magnate Estée Lauder; Stephen Schwarzman, a founder of the private equity firm Blackstone; Charles Koch and his late brother, David, the industrialists who have underwritten libertarian causes and funded lobbying efforts to roll back the estate tax; and Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs.(Powell Jobs' Emerson Collective is among ProPublica's largest donors.)

More than a century ago amid soaring inequality and the rise of stratospherically wealthy families such as the Mellons and Rockefellers, Congress created the estate tax as a way to raise money and clip the fortunes of the rich at death. Lawmakers later added a gift tax as a means of stopping wealthy people from passing their fortunes on to their children and grandchildren before death. Nowadays, 99.9% of Americans never have to worry about these taxes. They only hit individuals passing more than $11.7 million, or couples giving more than $23.4 million, to their heirs. The federal government imposes a roughly 40% levy on amounts above those figures before that wealth is passed on to heirs.

For her part, Powell Jobs has decried as “dangerous for a society" the early 20th century fortunes of the Mellons, Rockefellers and others. “I'm not interested in legacy wealth buildings, and my children know that," she told The New York Times last year. “Steve wasn't interested in that. If I live long enough, it ends with me."

Nonetheless, after the death of her husband in 2011, Powell Jobs used a series of GRATs to pass on around a half a billion dollars, estate-tax-free, to her children, friends and other family, according to the tax records and interviews with her longtime attorney. By using the GRATs, she avoided at least $200 million in estate and gift taxes.

Her attorney, Larry Sonsini, said Powell Jobs did this so that her children would have cash to pay estate taxes when she dies and they inherit “nostalgic and hard assets," such as real estate, art and a yacht. (At 260 feet, Venus is among the larger pleasure ships in the world.) Without the $500 million or so passed through the trusts, he said, Powell Jobs' heirs would have to sell stock that she intends to give to charity to pay her estate tax bill.

Sonsini said Powell Jobs, whose fortune is pegged at $21 billion by Forbes, has already given billions away to charity and paid $2.5 billion in state and federal taxes between 2012 and 2020. “When you look at an estate that may be worth multiple billions, and all the rest is going to charity, and you put it in perspective, what is the problem we're worried about here?" Sonsini asked. “This is not about creating dynasty wealth for these kids."

In a written statement, Powell Jobs said she supports “reforms that make the tax code more fair. Through my work at Emerson Collective and philanthropic commitments, I have dedicated my life and assets to the pursuit of a more just and equitable society."

Others whose special trusts ProPublica identified, including Bloomberg and the Kochs,declined to comment on why they'd set up the trusts or their estate-tax implications. Representatives for Lauder didn't respond to requests to accept questions on his behalf. Schwarzman's spokesperson wrote that he is “one of the largest individual taxpayers in the country and fully complies with all tax rules."

A typical GRAT entails putting assets, like stocks, in a trust that ultimately benefits a person's heirs. The trust pays back an amount equal to what the trust's creator put in plus a modest amount of interest. But any gains on the investments above that amount flow to the heirs free of gift or estate taxes. So if a person puts $100 million worth of stock in a GRAT and the stock rises in value to $130 million, their heirs would receive about $30 million tax-free.

In 1990, Congress accidentally created GRATs when it closed another estate tax loophole that was popular at the time. The IRS challenged the maneuver but lost in court.

“I don't blame the taxpayers who are doing it," said Daniel Hemel, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. “Congress has virtually invited them to do it. I blame Congress for creating the monster and then failing to stop the monster once it became clear how much of the tax base the GRAT monster would eat up."

Users of the trusts extend well beyond the top of the Forbes rankings, ProPublica's analysis of the confidential IRS files show. Erik Prince, founder of the military contractor Blackwater and himself heir to an auto parts fortune, used the shelter. Fashion designer Calvin Klein has used them, as have “Saturday Night Live" creator Lorne Michaels and media mogul Oprah Winfrey.

“We have paid all taxes due," a spokesperson for Winfrey said. A representative of Klein did not accept questions from ProPublica or respond to messages. A spokesman for Michaels declined to comment.

Prince also did not answer questions. “Hey if you publish private information about me I'll be sure to return the favor," he wrote. “Go ahead and fuck off."

The GRAT has become so ubiquitous in recent decades that high-end tax lawyers consider it a plain vanilla strategy. “This is an off-the-shelf solution," said Michael Kosnitzky, co-leader of the private wealth practice at law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. “Almost every wealthy person should have one."

ProPublica's tally almost certainly undercounts the number of Forbes 100 members who use shelters to avoid estate taxes. ProPublica counted only those people whose tax records or public filings explicitly mention GRATs or other trusts commonly used to dodge gift and estate taxes. But a wealthy person can call their trusts whatever they want, leaving plenty of trusts outside of ProPublica's count.

This month, the House and Senate are hammering out proposals to raise revenue to help pay for the Biden administration's plans to expand the social safety net. The legislative blueprint released by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., would defang GRATs and other trusts, which would still be legal but no longer be as useful for estate tax avoidance. If the provision makes it into law, “it would put a major dent in GRATs," said Bob Lord, an Arizona attorney who specializes in trusts and estates.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has proposed going further in undercutting estate tax avoidance tools. But the prospect of any reform is uncertain, as Democrats on Capitol Hill struggle to find the votes to pass the package of spending and tax changes.

:{:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

GRATs are commonly described by tax lawyers as a “heads I win, tails we tie" proposition. If the investment placed in the GRAT soars in value, that increase passes to an heir without being subject to future estate tax. If the investment doesn't go up, the wealthy person can simply try again and again until they succeed, leading many users to have multiple GRATs going at a time....

How do we prevent America from becoming an aristocracy, while also funding the programs that Americans desperately need?

One way is to get rid of a tax loophole you've probably never heard of. It's known as the "stepped-up basis" rule.

Here's how the stepped-up-basis loophole now works. Take a man named Jeff. At his death, Jeff owns $30 million-worth of stocks he originally bought for a total of $10 million. Under existing law, neither Jeff nor his heirs would owe federal tax on the $20 million of gains because they're automatically "stepped up" to their value when he dies — $30 million.

Under Biden's proposal, Jeff's $20 million of gains would be taxed. And don't worry: Biden's proposal doesn't touch tax-favored retirement accounts, such as 401-Ks, and it only applies to the very richest Americans.

As it is now, the stepped-up basis loophole enables the super-rich, like Jeff, to avoid paying more than $40 billion in taxes each year. It has allowed them to skip taxes on the increased values of mansions and artworks as well as shares of stock.

In fact, it's one of the chief means by which dynastic wealth has grown and been passed from generation to generation, enabling subsequent generations to live off that growing wealth and never pay a dime of taxes on it.

Unless the stepped-up basis loophole is closed, we will soon have a large class of hugely rich people who have never worked a day in their lives.

Over the next decades, rich baby boomers will pass on an estimated $58 trillion of wealth to their millennial children — the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history.

Closing this giant tax loophole for the super-rich is how Biden intends to fund part of his American Families Plan, which would provide every child with 2 years of pre-school and every student with 2 years of free community college, as well as provide paid family and medical leave to every worker.

Close this stepped-up basis loophole, and we help finance the programs the vast majority of Americans desperately need and deserve. We also end the explosion of dynastic wealth. It should be a no-brainer.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

• Think About It: The U.S. Is the Richest Country as Well as the Most ... ›
• Joe Biden's plans would target the ultra-wealthy for more tax dollars ... ›
• What would happen if we actually taxed the rich? - Alternet.org ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

• Substantial Income of Wealthy Households Escapes Annual ... ›
• 10 Accounting Tricks the 1% Use to Dodge the Taxman - The ... ›
• Here are 5 ways the super-rich manage to pay lower taxes ›

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/house-dems-take-aim-at-trust-fund-babies-with-estate-tax-designed-to-combat-obscene-wealth-inequality/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/house-dems-take-aim-at-trust-fund-babies-with-estate-tax-designed-to-combat-obscene-wealth-inequality/

no lnx

House Dems take aim at ‘trust fund babies’ with estate tax designed to combat obscene wealth inequality

Advisor to the President Ivanka Trump addresses the G20 Women’s Empowerment Event in Osaka, Japan, Saturday, June 29 2019. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

Written by Common Dreams October 26, 2019

California Congressman Jimmy Gomez on Friday introduced legislation in the Democrat-controlled U.S. House that aims to address “our country’s rapidly increasing wealth inequality by strengthening the estate tax and ensuring the wealthiest among us pay their fair share.”

“Trust fund babies who have done nothing to earn their wealth besides being born into the right family have no right to pay a lower tax rate on their millions than hard-working Americans do on the income that they work for.”

—Charlie Simmons, Patriotic Millionaires

The For the 99.8% Act would impose a progressive tax on the estates of the richest Americans. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, introduced the companion bill in the Republican-controlled Senate in January.

Under the bill, “the families of all 588 billionaires in America would owe up to $2.2 trillion in estate taxes, amounting to revenue that can be used to address critical needs for working families and the most vulnerable among us,” according to Gomez’s office.

“The ever-widening gap between the ultra-rich and the rest of us has reached alarming proportions and demands a strong legislative response,” Gomez, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement. “No longer can we allow this structural power imbalance—one where the billionaire-class hoards the very wealth working families helped to create—define our nation’s values and priorities.”

Gomez also thanked Sanders “for joining me in our shared mission to level the economic playing field for the working-class and transform our economy into one that works for every American.”

“No longer can we allow this structural power imbalance… define our nation’s values and priorities.”

—Rep. Jimmy Gomez

“We are facing levels of inequality not seen since the Gilded Age of the robber barons, where the top one-tenth of one percent owns about as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent,” Sanders said Friday. “The richest 400 billionaires pay lower taxes than everyone else. In my view, this obscene inequality in wealth and political power is not compatible with a democratic society.”

The White House hopeful added that “I am proud that Rep. Gomez is leading three dozen members of the House in introducing the For The 99.8% Act to tax today’s dynasty trusts and curb their power, while raising trillions of dollars for the essential programs we need as a country.”

The House bill’s 37 original co-sponsors include Democratic Reps. Pramila Jayapal (Wash.) and Mark Pocan (Wis.) as well as the four freshmen congresswomen collectively known as “the Squad,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.).

The bill is also backed by 80 national organizations that sent a letter of support to Congress Friday. The letter highlighted various provisions of the bill and pointed out that “the public overwhelmingly favors raising taxes on the wealthy—typically by a margin of 2 to 1.”

“In my view, this obscene inequality in wealth and political power is not compatible with a democratic society.”

—Sen. Bernie Sanders

Americans for Tax Fairness executive director Frank Clemente, whose group signed on to the letter, called the legislation “a critical step” toward creating “an economy that works for all of us, not just the wealthy few.”

“It will raise well over $300 billion,” Clemente noted, “that can be used to help people afford healthcare, improve our schools, and rebuild crumbling infrastructure across the country.”

Patriotic Millionaires also signed the support letter. Retired tech executive Charlie Simmons, a member of the group, said in a statement that “as a millionaire who will end up paying the estate tax, I say that we should expand it.”

“Tax my estate,” said Simmons. “Trust fund babies who have done nothing to earn their wealth besides being born into the right family have no right to pay a lower tax rate on their millions than hard-working Americans do on the income that they work for.”

==

not sure this is relevant here specifically

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/the-irs-tried-to-go-after-the-ultra-rich-with-audits-from-hell-until-congress-stepped-in-to-protect-the-wealthy/

very long

On June 30, 2016, an auto-parts magnate received the kind of news anyone would dread: The Internal Revenue Service had determined he had engaged in abusive tax maneuvers. He stood accused of masking about $5 billion in income. The IRS wanted over $1.2 billion in back taxes and penalties.

The magnate, Georg Schaeffler, was the billionaire scion of a family-owned German manufacturer and was quietly working as a corporate lawyer in Dallas. Schaeffler had extra reason to fear the IRS, it seemed. He wasn’t in the sights of just any division of the agency but the equivalent of its SEAL Team 6.

In 2009, the IRS had formed a crack team of specialists to unravel the tax dodges of the ultrawealthy. In an age of widening inequality, with a concentration of wealth not seen since the Gilded Age, the rich were evading taxes through ever more sophisticated maneuvers. The IRS commissioner aimed to stanch the country’s losses with what he proclaimed would be “a game-changing strategy.” In short order, Charles Rettig, then a high-powered tax lawyer and today President Donald Trump’s IRS commissioner, warned that the squad was conducting “the audits from hell.” If Trump were being audited, Rettig wrote during the presidential campaign, this is the elite team that would do it.

The wealth team embarked on a contentious audit of Schaeffler in 2012, eventually determining that he owed about $1.2 billion in unpaid taxes and penalties. But after seven years of grinding bureaucratic combat, the IRS abandoned its campaign. The agency informed Schaeffler’s lawyers it was willing to accept just tens of millions, according to a person familiar with the audit.

How did a case that consumed so many years of effort, with a team of its finest experts working on a signature mission, produce such a piddling result for the IRS? The Schaeffler case offers a rare window into just how challenging it is to take on the ultrawealthy. For starters, they can devote seemingly limitless resources to hiring the best legal and accounting talent. Such taxpayers tend not to steamroll tax laws; they employ complex, highly refined strategies that seek to stretch the tax code to their advantage. It can take years for IRS investigators just to understand a transaction and deem it to be a violation.

Once that happens, the IRS team has to contend with battalions of high-priced lawyers and accountants that often outnumber and outgun even the agency’s elite SWAT team. “We are nowhere near a circumstance where the IRS could launch the types of audits we need to tackle sophisticated taxpayers in a complicated world,” said Steven Rosenthal, who used to represent wealthy taxpayers and is now a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution.

Because the audits are private — IRS officials can go to prison if they divulge taxpayer information — details of the often epic paper battles between the rich and the tax collectors are sparse, with little in the public record. Attorneys are also loath to talk about their clients’ taxes, and most wealthy people strive to keep their financial affairs under wraps. Such disputes almost always settle out of court.

But ProPublica was able to reconstruct the key points in the Schaeffler case. The billionaire’s lawyers and accountants first crafted a transaction of unusual complexity, one so novel that they acknowledged, even as they planned it, that it was likely to be challenged by the IRS. Then Schaeffler deployed teams of professionals to battle the IRS on multiple fronts. They denied that he owed any money, arguing the agency fundamentally misunderstood the tax issues. Schaeffler’s representatives complained to top officials at the agency; they challenged document requests in court. At various times, IRS auditors felt Schaeffler’s side was purposely stalling. But in the end, Schaeffler’s team emerged almost completely victorious.

His experience was telling. The IRS’ new approach to taking on the superwealthy has been stymied. The wealthy’s lobbyists immediately pushed to defang the new team. And soon after the group was formed, Republicans in Congress began slashing the agency’s budget. As a result, the team didn’t receive the resources it was promised. Thousands of IRS employees left from every corner of the agency, especially ones with expertise in complex audits, the kinds of specialists the agency hoped would staff the new elite unit. The agency had planned to assign 242 examiners to the group by 2012, according to a report by the IRS’ inspector general. But by 2014, it had only 96 auditors. By last year, the number had fallen to 58.

The wealth squad never came close to having the impact its proponents envisaged. As Robert Gardner, a 39-year veteran of the IRS who often interacted with the team as a top official at the agency’s tax whistleblower office, put it, “From the minute it went live, it was dead on arrival.”

Most people picture IRS officials as all-knowing and fearsome. But when it comes to understanding how the superwealthy move their money around, IRS auditors historically have been more like high school physics teachers trying to operate the Large Hadron Collider.

That began to change in the early 2000s, after Congress and the agency uncovered widespread use of abusive tax shelters by the rich. The discovery led to criminal charges, and settlements by major accounting firms. By the end of the decade, the IRS had determined that millions of Americans had secret bank accounts abroad. The agency managed to crack open Switzerland’s banking secrecy, and it recouped billions in lost tax revenue.

The IRS came to realize it was not properly auditing the ultrawealthy. Multimillionaires frequently don’t have easily visible income. They often have trusts, foundations, limited liability companies, complex partnerships and overseas operations, all woven together to lower their tax bills. When IRS auditors examined their finances, they typically looked narrowly. They might scrutinize just one return for one entity and examine, say, a year’s gifts or income.

Belatedly attempting to confront improper tax avoidance, the IRS formed what was officially called the Global High Wealth Industry Group in 2009. “The genesis was: If you think of an incredibly wealthy family, their web of entities somehow gives them a remarkably low effective tax rate,” said former IRS Commissioner Steven Miller, who was one of those responsible for creating the wealth squad. “We hadn’t really been looking at it all together, and shame on us.”

The IRS located the group within the division that audits the biggest companies in recognition of the fact that the finances of the 1 percent resemble those of multinational corporations more than those of the average rich person.

The vision was clear, as Doug Shulman, a George W. Bush appointee who remained to helm the agency under the Obama administration, explained in a 2009 speech: “We want to better understand the entire economic picture of the enterprise controlled by the wealthy individual.”

It’s particularly important to audit the wealthy well, and not simply because that’s where the money is. That’s where the cheating is, too. Studies show that the wealthiest are more likely to avoid paying taxes. The top 0.5 percent in income account for fully a fifth of all the underreported income, according to a 2010 study by the IRS’ Andrew Johns and the University of Michigan’s Joel Slemrod. Adjusted for inflation, that’s more than $50 billion each year in unpaid taxes.

The plans for the wealth squad seemed like a step forward. In a few years, the group would be staffed with several hundred auditors. A team of examiners would tackle each audit, not just one or two agents, as was more typical in the past. The new group would draw from the IRS’ best of the best.

That was crucial because IRS auditors have a long-standing reputation, at least among the practitioners who represent deep-pocketed taxpayers, as hapless and overmatched. The agents can fritter away years, tax lawyers say, auditing transactions they don’t grasp. “In private practice, we played whack-a-mole,” said Rosenthal, of the Tax Policy Center. “The IRS felt a transaction was suspect but couldn’t figure out why, so it would raise an issue and we’d whack it and they would raise another and we’d whack it. The IRS was ill-equipped.”

The Global High Wealth Group was supposed to change that. Indeed, with all the fanfare at the outset, tax practitioners began to worry on behalf of their clientele. “The impression was it was all going to be specialists in fields, highly trained. The IRS would assemble teams with the exact right expertise to target these issues,” Chicago-based tax attorney Jenny Johnson said.

The new group’s first moves spurred resistance. The team sent wide-ranging requests for information seeking details about their targets’ entire empires. Taxpayers with more than $10 million in income or assets received a dozen pages of initial requests, with the promise of many more to follow. The agency sought years of details on every entity it could tie to the subject of the audits.

In past audits, that initial overture had been limited to one or two pages, with narrowly tailored requests. Here, a typical request sought information on a vast array of issues. One example: a list of any U.S. or foreign entity in which the taxpayer held an “at least a 20 percent” interest, including any “hybrid instruments” that could be turned into a 20 percent or more ownership share. The taxpayer would then have to identify “each and every current and former officer, trustee, and manager” from the entity’s inception.

Taxpayers who received such requests recoiled. Attacking the core idea that Shulman had said would animate the audits, their attorneys and accountants argued the examinations sought too much information, creating an onerous burden. The audits “proceeded into a proctology exam, unearthing every aspect of their lives,” said Mark Allison, a prominent tax attorney for Caplin & Drysdale who has represented taxpayers undergoing Global High Wealth audits. “It was extraordinarily intrusive. Not surprisingly, these people tend to be private and are not used to sharing.”

Tax practitioners took their concerns directly to the agency, at American Bar Association conferences and during the ABA’s regular private meetings with top IRS officials. “Part of our approach was to have private sit-downs to raise issues and concerns,” said Allison, who has served in top roles in the ABA’s tax division for years. We were “telling them this was too much, unwieldy and therefore unfair.” Allison said he told high-ranking IRS officials, “You need to rein in these audit teams.”

For years, politicians have hammered the IRS for its supposed abuse of taxpayers. Congress created a “Taxpayer Bill of Rights” in the mid-1990s. Today, the IRS often refers to its work as “customer service.” One result of constant congressional scrutiny is that senior IRS officials are willing to meet with top tax lawyers and address their concerns. “There was help there. They stuck their necks out for me,” Allison said.

The IRS publicly retreated. Speaking at a Washington, D.C., Bar Association event in February 2013, a top IRS official, James Fee, conceded the demands were too detailed and long, telling the gathering that the agency has “taken strides to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” The Global High Wealth group began to limit its initial document requests.

The lobbying campaign, combined with the lack of funding for the group, took its toll. One report estimated that the wealth team had audited only around a dozen wealthy taxpayers in its first two and a half years. In a September 2015 report, the IRS’ inspector general said the agency had failed to establish the team as a “standalone” group “capable of conducting all of its own examinations.” The group didn’t have steady leadership, with three directors in its first five years. When it did audit the ultrawealthy, more than 40 percent the reviews resulted in no additional taxes.

The inspector general also criticized the IRS broadly — not just its high-wealth team — for not focusing enough on the richest taxpayers. In 2010, the IRS as a whole audited over 32,000 millionaires. By 2018, that number had fallen to just over 16,000, according to data compiled by Syracuse University. Audits of the wealthiest Americans have collapsed 52 percent since 2011, falling more substantially than audits of the middle class and the poor. Almost half of audits of the wealthy were of taxpayers making $200,000 to $399,000. Those audits brought in $605 per audit hour worked. Exams of those making over $5 million, by contrast, brought in more than $4,500 an hour.

The IRS didn’t even have the resources to pursue millionaires who had been hit with a hefty tax bill and simply stiffed Uncle Sam. It “appeared to no longer emphasize the collection of delinquent accounts of global high wealth taxpayers,” a 2017 inspector general report said.

In recent years, the number of Global High Wealth audits has been higher — it closed 149 audits in the last year — but tax lawyers and former IRS officials say even that improvement is deceptive. A major reason is that the audits are much less ambitious. “They were longer at the beginning and shorter as the process moved on,” Johnson, the tax attorney, said.....much more

==

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/mcconnell-estate-tax-repeal-would-hand-tens-of-billions-to-walton-and-koch-families-greed-has-no-limit-for-gop/

Just over a year after the GOP rammed through its $1.5 trillion tax plan—which has predictably rewarded the ultra-rich while doing virtually nothing for workers—Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his Republican colleagues were condemned for pushing yet another “blatant giveaway to their wealthy donors ntroducing a bill on Monday that would permanently repeal the estate tax.

“Greed has no limit for the GOP,” declared Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness. “We need to reverse direction—not allow the GOP to hand the rich even more tax cuts.”

The deeply unpopular Republican tax law already significantly weakened the estate tax by doubling the exemption, allowing couples with up to $22 million to pass on their fortunes tax-free.

If it passes Congress, the plan introduced by Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), John Thune (R-S.D.), and McConnell—and co-sponsored by dozens of Senate Republicans—would accomplish the longstanding GOP goal of completely eliminating the estate tax.

“Ending the estate tax would give a tax break of up to $63 billion to the Walton family and $39 billion to the Kochs—but $0 to 99.8% of Americans,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) noted in a tweet on Tuesday. “At a time of record inequality, the very last thing we should do is line the pockets of the rich.” ...Ending the estate tax would give a tax break of up to $63 billion to the Walton family and $39 billion to the Kochs—but $0 to 99.8% of Americans.

At a time of record inequality, the very last thing we should do is line the pockets of the rich. ...The proposal, backed by three of the top Republicans in the Senate, comes as leading Democrats call for dramatically increasing taxes on the wealthy. ...McConnell and fellow Republican senators presented their plan as an effort to provide relief to “hard-working families” and “family-run farms, ranches, and businesses.”

But progressive critics were quick to note that, in reality, the estate tax only affects a relatively tiny number of ultra-rich families, and that the overwhelming majority of Americans will see zero benefit from the Republican bill.

According to the Tax Policy Center, only around 1,700 of the country’s wealthiest families are expected to pay the estate tax each year under the GOP law.

“Who in the world could look at this country and think that giving more money to the heirs of multi-million dollar fortunes is our most urgent and pressing need? The estate tax affects less than 2,000 families each year, and even with the tax, those heirs are able to inherit over $22 million completely tax free,” Morris Pearl, chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, said in a statement. “Meanwhile, nearly 100 million Americans live in or near poverty, and 40 percent of working Americans make less than $15 an hour.”

“This legislation is insulting to those millions of Americans who are struggling, it is harmful to the fabric of our democracy, and it is blatantly bad policy that is intended only to please ultra-wealthy Republican donors.”

Warren Gunnels, policy director for Sen. Sanders, provided a short list of the families that would benefit most from the GOP plan to repeal the estate tax:[twt] ...The Hill and market research firm HarrisX earlier this month, 59 percent of the U.S. public supports raising the top marginal tax rate to 70 percent.

==

https://www.alternet.org/while-rest-world-burned-billionaires-made-more-money-2017-any-other-year-history

During a year in which so much of the world faced deep poverty, the corrosive effects of austerity, and extreme weather caused by the worsening human-caused climate crisis—from devastating hurricanes to deadly wildfires and floods—one class of individuals raked in more money in 2017 than any other year in recorded history: the world's billionaires.

"No money for health or infrastructure, all the money in the world for yachts."

—Josh Shepperd

According to the Swiss bank UBS's fifth annual billionaires report published on Friday, billionaires across the globe increased their wealth by $1.4 trillion last year—an astonishing 20 percent—bringing their combined wealth to $8.9 trillion.

"The past 30 years have seen far greater wealth creation than theGilded Age," the UBS report notes. "That period bred generations of families in the U.S. and Europe who went on to influence business, banking, politics, philanthropy, and the arts for more than 100 years."

UBS estimates that the world now has a total of 2,158 billionaires, with 179 billionaires created last year. The United States alone is home to 585 billionaires—the most in the world—up from 563 in 2017.

Meanwhile, according to a June report by U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Philip Alston, 18.5 million Americans live in extreme poverty and "5.3 million live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty."

A significant percentage of the "newly created" billionaires are hardly the self-made men—and they are overwhelmingly men—of popular lore. According to UBS, 40 of the 179 new billionaires created last year inherited their wealth—a trend that has driven an explosion of wealth inequality over the past several decades.

According to UBS, this trend will continue to accelerate over the next 20 years, given that there are currently 701 billionaires over the age of 70.

"A major wealth transition has begun. Over the past five years (2012–2017), the sum passed by deceased billionaires to beneficiaries has grown by an average of 17 percent each year," the UBS report concludes. "Over the next two decades we expect a wealth transition of $3.4 trillion worldwide—almost 40 percent of current total billionaire wealth."

==

And while the lobbying clout of the wealthy is most often deployed through industry trade associations and lawyers, some rich families have locked arms to advance their interests more directly.

:{

}:

The inheritance tax has been a primary target. In the early 1990s, a California family office executive named Patricia Soldano began lobbying on behalf of wealthy families to repeal the tax, which would not only save them money, but also make it easier to preserve their business empires from one generation to the next. The idea struck many hardened operatives as unrealistic at the time, given that the tax affected only the wealthiest Americans. But Ms. Soldano’s efforts — funded in part by the Mars and Koch families — laid the groundwork for a one-year elimination in 2010.

The tax has been restored, but currently applies only to couples leaving roughly $11 million or more to their heirs, up from those leaving more than $1.2 million when Ms. Soldano started her campaign. It affected fewer than 5,200 families last year.

:{

}:

nyt 12/30

==

The Super-Wealthy 18

Posted by ELI SANDERS on April 26 at 13:37 PM

Yesterday the watchdog groups Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy released this report on the 10-year “stealth campaign” by certain super-wealthy families to repeal the Estate Tax. The report names two prominent local families and, according to the press release…

…details for the first time the vast money, influence and deceptive marketing techniques behind the rhetoric in the campaign to repeal the tax. It reveals how 18 families worth a total of $185.5 billion have financed and coordinated a 10-year effort to repeal the estate tax, a move that would collectively net them a windfall of $71.6 billion.

Can you guess which local families? Here’s the list:

Allyn-Soderberg Family (Welch Allyn Inc.)

Blethen Family (Seattle Times Co.)

Cox Family (Cox Enterprises, Inc.)

DeVos and Van Andel Families (Alticor/Amway)

Dorrance Family (Campbell Soup Company)

Gallo (E&J Gallo Winery)

Harbert Family

Johnson Family (BET, RLJ Development Co.)

Koch Family (Koch Industries)

Mars Family (Mars Inc.)

Mayer Family (Captiva Resources)

Nordstrom Family (Nordstrom Inc.)

Sobrato Family (Sobrato Development)

Stephens Family (Stephens Inc.)

Timken Family (The Timken Company)

Walton Family (Wal-Mart)

Wegman Family (Wegmans Food Markets, Inc.)

==