Our country is a charade at the moment.

are the ones who will believe anything he says. Anything.

and many people think they'll have to pay a tax when Granny dies and leaves them five thousand dollars. I've heard it many times and it drives me crazy. They don't bother to read what the Estate Tax really is.

but they're not interested in facts.

Which of them has more than 5 million to leave their kids?

All the people clapping, hahaha

A individual or household with $50K take home a year for 20 years has made $1 million.

However, these people are going to spend almost that much annually just to pay for housing, utilities, transportation, normal household expenses, and emergencies over the years. Throw in a kid or two, or a medical condition, and that money is gone before you know it.

Just normal expenses have a nasty habit of sneaking up on people.

Haele

Unfortunately, those who actually need to be concerned about paying estate taxes are also rich enough to bribe, I mean lobby Congress to eliminate the tax.

Zero for me and you.

in no other context can you transfer massive amounts of money from one person to another tax-free.

you can gift up to $14,000 per giver per recipient per year tax-free. e.g., for a family of 4 that's $56,000 per year from 2 parents to 2 kids. that's way more than enough for the vast majority of people.

you can't transfer billions tax-free when you're alive, what's the logic for being able to transfer it tax-free when you die?

i'll give you a hint: there is no legitimate reason for ripping a massive aristocracy-enabling hole through the tax code.

I'm not sure of the amounts but they are substantial.

With planning a large amount can be transferred from parents to children or even to unrelated individuals. Most family businesses could take advantage of those gifts to pretty much eliminate estate taxes in the long run by transferring ownership of the business and its assets to the children of the owners. Of course, when the patriarch is a SOB who refuses to divest ahead of time or make the most of his legal gifts, the government can take a bigger chuck.

Even when there are millions or billions, a lot can be done to transfer wealth to avoid taxes. But it mostly involves paying lawyers, accountants, and tax specialists to create the structures to do that - trusts, corporations, etc. - and those tie up the money so it can't be as freely spent as it might otherwise be. The money paid to those professionals to create those structures might end up costing more than the taxes that would have been paid - but those costs are often deductible, so they still come out ahead.

goes against the unified lifetime exemption. The lifetime exemption is for both estate and gift taxes -- so if you give 5.4 million when alive, your estate will owe taxes on the first dollar when you die.

That said, people that know they are likely to have estate tax issues usually start gifting while they are alive.

Some do not and refuse to cede control while they are alive.

But that is no reason to give them any more break than they were originally offered. The gifts that can be given during their lifetime are intended to assist those with small (truly small, not the pseudo "small businesses" as the Republicans call them) family farms and business to keep them in the family.

They fall for this "death tax" scam just like they get hoodwinked by the "small business" hoax, which applies to 500 of Trump's business rackets. My brother the Trumper thinks the "death tax" scam will protect his business inheritance, but it's probably less than $100K and no amount of fact will convince him otherwise.

Years of Republican driven propaganda has brainwashed about a third of the population and we will never get those people back, my poor deluded brother included.

are a facing this death tax. Bullcrap!! University of Nebraska ran a survey and found only 2 (two) farmers that might have Tax issues today if they transferred their assets. If they incorporated like everyone else,well this situation would not happen.

These Suckers are still repeating Reaganomics which we know,does not work.

(probably 5 or 10 years ago) that not a single family farm had ever been put out of business or sold because of inheritance taxes. There was also an article some time ago that profiled a family in Hawaii that owned a whole lot of land and were said to be facing ruinous taxes when the current owner died. Again, there would have been legal remedies that they weren't bothering with.

for over fifty years. If this case was to happen,it most likely would be a result of lack of info or lack of proper Land and improvement planning within a personal estate.

Just another Red Herring.

They get to shelter or protect a lot, but they shouldn't be able to pass everything on. They shouldn't be allowed to not pay a reasonable share of their wealth. The tax-free portion is already quite generous.

I happen to believe there ought to be a maximum wage, and all income above some amount should be taxed at 100%, or so close to it that there's no point in making any more.

I read not so long ago that back when tax rates were very high, as in the 1950's, there was not benefit to paying higher-ups in a company any more money, so that was an important reason wages roses so much for the working class during those years. Genuine distribution of the wealth.

Remember we had a Union Wage Freeze and fake price freeze under Nixon which started the Corporate Greed cycle.

worried that when they inherit a billion dollars they will have to pay tax on it.

sigh

But to be fair, they truly would rather the society NOT have the money and all the good it will do if they can thumb their noses at a liberal.

Last edited Wed Sep 27, 2017, 05:50 PM - Edit history (1)

Orange Cheato wants to eliminate the brat tax because he wants to be sure rich brats will never have to do an honest day's work in their lives to have fortunes handed to them.

The State quite often has a lower threshold than Federal and there is nothing that can be done at the Federal level that will stop that.

Florida not only does not have estate taxes, it doesn't have state income taxes or intangible property taxes (which tax investments). The state legislature also has worked to minimize property taxes which leaves only sales taxes to pay for everything in the state - and guess who pays more sales tax? The lower and middle class, of course.

All about framing the issue.

I have long called it "The Stupidity Tax" Even when it kicked in at a much lower level, it was easy to avoid with some planning.

I remember seeing a rancher's wife on TV moaning and groaning about how the estate tax would prevent her husband from leaving the ranch to their son. The person interviewing her asked about giving the son small bits of ownership (below the gift tax) over the years, so that the amount he inherited would be below the estate tax level. Her reply was that her husband didn't want to give up any control of the ranch before he dies.

So..... given a way to avoid the estate tax, they chose to ignore that and pay the tax. And then complain that they HAD to pay the tax.

My parent's estate wasn't anything like $5 million, but we had to pay half on a lot of it. We couldn't even afford to keep their house. This was back in 2002. There was an abstract painting from my grandmother's collection that I had always liked, and it got appraised at $40,000, and I had to pay $20,000 to keep it in the family (I gulped, but I did). She had liked and supported living modern artists in the 1950s up to her death in 1966.

By the way, when my grandmother died in 1966, all the grandchildren got to say what they wanted kept in the family if they liked something in particular. There was a 50% inheritance tax on all of it. That abstract painting I liked was only assessed at $600 as the artist was still alive, so my parents could swing it. My cousin liked a small bronze sculpture by a Swiss artist, but the Swiss guy had died the year before, and the sculpture was appraised at $16,000. His parents, with 5 children at the time, couldn't afford the $8000 they would have had to pay to keep the sculpture in the family, so it got put up for auction in 1967, where it brought $25,000 at the time. I was 15, and my cousin was 17. Fast forward 40 years, and my grandmother's bronze sculpture came up again for auction in New York. Her name was listed in the catalog as the provenance. It brought $4 million. I'm sure my cousin was thrilled.

In 2017%, up to 40% on amounts over $5,490,000. The example given in what I read, the 2017 exemption is $5.49 million, so if you die with an estate valued at $5,490,020, only $20 is taxed. The first $5.49 million is exempt.

This chart will be messed up, but it gives an idea of the historic rates since 2000:

When my grandmother died in 1969 estate taxes were much higher than in the last couple of decades. There was a sort of scam that was perpetuated, at least in my little home town. The guy that did most estate appraisals for most of the well to do white people called all furniture "used junk furniture," artwork and paintings were "decor items," and other personal possessions were just "old clothes and costume jewelry." The only jewelry that was appraised by an expert were the few items that she designated in her will. Real estate also had to be professionally appraised and taxed accordingly.

Antique furniture that had been in the family for 200 years was valued at junk store prices. Original paintings were priced as though they were the commercially printed reproductions given away at the grocery store. My grandmother's fur coat was valued as if it were a wool coat from Goodwill.

He would have valued your grandmother's artwork as "decor items" and priced them as if they came from the five & dime!

Even as a teenager I could see this was a scam to keep the government from getting more taxes. But given situations like your family's back then, I don't really blame the man - he'd known my grandmother and grandfather since they moved to Florida in 1925. Many of the other families he performed the same service for he'd known all his life. He considered it a favor for friends so they could keep the families possessions together.

And MANY of them don't believe me when I tell them that it does not and will not apply to their estates.

I live in the Deep South, and most of my clients have been programmed by the right wing media and by their peers to believe that the government will be at their graveside, collecting what's left of the pittance of their life's earnings.