Isn’t part of the idea of estate tax that money should be put back into the system to avoid stagnation of the economy?

Doesn’t estate tax also encourage people to share their wealth with loved ones while they are still alive? This is the first I’ve heard of estate taxes being applied to a spouse.

Aren’t donations to charity exempt from estate tax?

Yes. Yes. Yes. I say pry their money from their cold, dead hands.

Make everyone rich, we’d all work REALLY hard, just like those Wall Street experts that drove the economy into a ravine.

How hard would you work if 90% of your income went to strangers?

Same as now. I’m not motivated by selfishness or greed, and 100% of my income will eventually go to strangers in time.

It’s interesting that so many people step from the very sound idea that markets and governments have to be capable of functioning even if people within the system are motivated by the basest, most sociopathic desires to a completely different idea that people should be motivated by greed and sociopathy in order for capitalism to work.

It’s a wealthy country, I’m well fed and own land; why should I obsess over the movement of little pieces of paper? It’s not healthy. I’m OK with a 100% estate tax on everything over a million bucks – bring it on!

Anyway, I apologize. I’m always slightly irked by the assumption that rich=evil, and I let my fingers talk before my brain caught up.

I’m not sure how we got from Madison’s notion that, if men were angels, no government would be necessary, to the modern laissez-faire notion that, because men are devils, no government is necessary.

Nice. I’m stealing this line.

Yes, because everybody knows that all rich people worked for their fortunes. They didn’t, you know, inherit it or anything.

Demidan, how greedy (or rich or poor or just regular) do you have to be to plan your job, salary, investments or donations around taxation. Just like everybody does.

I suppose that their could be less nefarious reasons than actively killing the person such as less application of extraordinary means to keep a terminal patient alive and more DNR’s. It is also not unreasonable that the person who is dying might want to die at a particular time because they themselves don’t want to give half their property to the government instead of their heirs.

My wife used to work at trust company which managed rich people’s money. They did the boring, pay the bills part, rather than the investment part. She had many tales of the crazy tax code and exotic investment instruments that seemed designed specifically and exclusively to pass down wealth from generation to generation while avoiding paying any taxes, estate, capital gains, or income, on the wealth that was passed down. Few of these schemes involved euthanasia at a particular time. The current estate tax loophole is just a more straightforward example.

And yea, all these tax increases are republican tax increases passed during the bush administration. The democrats are actually passing tax cuts so that the increases aren’t as big as they would be under the laws the republicans wrote. Republicans aren’t too likely to make the argument that these tax increases were just a cynical accounting gimmick to make the massive deficits resulting from their tax cuts look smaller, instead they will try to pretend they didn’t write and pass these laws and hope the media is lazy enough to let it slide with he-said-she-said reporting.

Personally I would love it if liberal democrats in the senate would filibuster these bills so that the tax goes back to its $1 million per person exemption and… can’t remember 45 o5 55% rate in 2011. Sadly there aren’t 40 liberal democrats in the senate.

In the zero estate tax year estate assets will be subject to capital gains taxes. Hilariously I think this means that regular people who aren’t pretty rich will actually have to pay some taxes on their inheritances where as under the estate tax they would be exempted from that.

So what this law does is decrease taxes on people inheriting multiple millions, and increase them on people inheriting less. It also means a paperwork headache as heirs will need to figure out the cost basis for the assets in order to pay capital gains taxes on them. I’m sure the very wealthy have good records that make this easy, but for regular people figuring out how much grandma’s 40 year old AT&T shares were purchased for might turn out to be quite a headache.

Could set up a very interesting natural experiment though. The rich ought to die in greater numbers, and the common people in lower numbers since the taxes are higher on regular people and lower on the rich next year (unless I’m wrong about the capitol gains and the vast majority are still exempted from them).

In large populations, it’s possible to discern rises and falls in the death rate around certain dates. For instance, people are more likely to die just after their birthdays and less likely to die just before them. One study showed that the death rate for members of one religion in a city dropped before a particular holy day and spiked afterward, but not for the rest of the population.

Momma doesn’t have to be thrown from the train, Momma seems to be able to choose (to some degree) when she falls off.

And I must admit I’m surprised at the amount of vitriol against the rich here. Someone spends their entire life working his/her ass off, and then they’re supposed to greet a FIFTY-FIVE PERCENT TAX with a smile and a “c’est la vie”? (OK, OK: “c’est la mort.”) I don’t blame them one bit for wanting to ensure that their money goes to their children, spouses, or other beneficiaries instead of to our bumbling federal government.

Met many very rich people? Any thoughts on how many of them actually got rich by working hard? Let alone by anything akin to ‘honest’ work?

One of the original reasons for an estate tax is precisely to stop the passing of enormous wealth on to undeserving relatives in order to reduce the growth of super-rich dynasties. Which are, to all intents and purposes, an undesirable aristocracy that gets to pull in yet more wealth and political power, which of course goes to making sure they stay on top. Wasn’t there some political argy-bargy a few hundred years ago on precisely that point? Umm, some place that tried a form of democracy for a while before it got taken over by oligarchs and became a fairground mirror image of what it claimed to be?

FTFY

What, do you want the rich to work until they are dead now? They aren’t allowed to retire? Or are you upset that they are providing capital so that businesses can function?

The super rich merely revert to their reptilian form temporarily while they evaluate which of their descendants they should implant their soul into.

But this estate tax fail was just too blaringly overlooked, esp. in the face of the nationalized health insurance reform (if you will-I’m bitter) push I thought, people are whining about how we are going to pay for it and you forget this? It would be like ignoring the penny jar with 100$ worth of pennies in it to get your hands on a crisp $20!

So lie to me if you have to heinid but do it with a straight face so I don’t start screaming profanities to strangers on the street.

Given how high the basic exemption is, and how few people are affected, I’m always amazed at all the whining. Since most of the assets are likely to be land on US soil, US government issued money, and shares in US chartered corporations the government seems to have done most of the heavy lifting. It’s not as if someone created their fortune out of thin air. Besides, if the taxes are too much, just say no. You can always pass on an inheritance. No one is forcing anyone to pay anything.

And thanks for the totally unnecessary history lesson; I’m familiar with why the estate tax was enacted, and I’m familiar with the historical roots of the Rule Against Perpetuities, and I’m aware of our nation’s historic issues with aristocracy. And if I work my butt off for the next three or four decades and end up with an estate larger than the $3.5 million estate tax exemption (which seems pretty unlikely at this point), I’m not going to be happy about being forced to give 55% of it to the government instead of to the Humane Society or whomever I want to benefit from the fruits of my labor once I’m unable to myself. I suspect you wouldn’t either, but maybe I’m wrong.

Sorry folks, but I don’t buy the notion that once someone gets rich their life becomes perfect and carefree, and therefore their pockets are open for public plundering.

Wait… gotta make a phone call :D