Not to put words into Ouchie's mouth, but $18 billion in estate taxes reflects just $45 billion in estates. Sheldon Adelson alone had a $33 billion fortune when he passed away.
The top 1% of population in this country controls over 45% of the wealth. I mean, yes, $18 billion seems like a lot of money, but to the truly wealthy it's not much.
Like, if the Bidwill family had to pay estate taxes on the est. $1 billion or so that the Cards were worth when Bill died, do you think they'd be able to keep ownership control of the team?
K9, I'm not arguing that wealth inequality is not a problem. Okay? I am particularly concerned about the pressure money puts on a democratic system set up like ours. I don't want people amassing trillion dollar fortunes, and so that's why I favor the estate tax. So there's that.
But did you know that when you pass, for example, the amount of your estate that you bequeath to charitable organizations (like the Red Cross) is estate tax free? And so, without seeing the actual estate tax return for the person in your example, I'm not going to concede that he clowned the system. There are too many caveats and nuances to the estate tax law to just blithely make that assumption.
Neither am I saying the estate tax is perfect. You're right to a certain extent that the very wealthy employ highly credentialed and trained professionals to minimize the estate tax on a specific estate tax returns. I work with them at my
Firm, and I see the fruits of their labors. But again man, show me some statistics or an article or something that supports the idea that a 10 billion dollar estate was passed to family members without a significant amount of estate tax being paid, because I don't really think that's happening. I'll concede this afternoon that the estate tax is not working as well as it could, but I'll also stand by the idea that, just like the income tax law, at a certain point, the estate tax law becomes undefeatable, and you have to pay in what you're required to pay in.
Finally, closing point... please look at the Forbes 400
The Forbes 400 is the definitive list of the richest Americans, ranking the country’s wealthiest billionaires by their net worths.
www.forbes.com
Do you know what jumps out at me? A lot of the richest people are new money. You don't see names like "Rockefeller" and "Carnegie" or "Ford". Instead you see "Musk" "Zuckerberg" and "Walton". My point is that yes, we need to be vigilant against oligarchy, but it's not a problem yet, and part of the reason is that the estate tax helps to keep family fortunes from growing unchecked. Mark Zuckerbergs family doesn't have to avoid estate tax
only on what he passes to his heirs. His heirs also have to find a way to minimize estate tax when they pass it to their children. And so on. The IRS gets a crack at a Family's wealth each generation, and (I think) most estate tax planning techniques only
defer (big difference vs. actually not paying) a certain amount of estate tax for a generation, or maybe two. Again, I'm not an estate planning expert, so I'm not going to say this is gospel, but I've been in public accounting for 26 years now.
So, vote to keep the estate tax, and vote to make it a little stronger Also don't despair too much sir when some crazy "watchdog" organization makes some sweeping claim that the estate tax is sham, but I don't think that it is.