Estate Tax Repeal Would Be a Bonanza for Trump and His Cabinet

[mitty14u2]

This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by NancyBlueINOklahoma (a host of the Latest Breaking News forum).

Source: Bloomberg


President-elect Donald Trump, who won the hearts and minds of millions of working-class voters, may help deliver a multibillion-dollar bonanza to America’s wealthiest families.

The Manhattan businessman’s election offers congressional Republicans their best chance in years to eliminate the estate tax, which he and others call the “death tax.” Abolishing it would save more than $20 billion a year for the millionaires and billionaires the tax applies to -- including the Trump family and several of the people he has chosen for his administration.

“A lot of families go through hell over the death tax,” Trump said during his presidential run. The tax’s opponents say it forces some families to sell their farms or small businesses in order to pay up. Studies suggest that only a small percentage of estates fall into those categories.

Wiping out the estate tax has been a longstanding goal for Republican lawmakers, and the party’s sweeping victories in the 2016 election have brought them thrillingly close to achieving it. But there are potential stumbling blocks. Their narrow margin in the Senate leaves few votes to spare. And Trump may have a hard time reconciling his populist campaign themes with a tax break for America’s richest.

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-12-09/estate-tax-repeal-under-trump-would-benefit-president-cabinet

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Repealing the Inheritance Tax will help ZERO Middle and Lower Classes, what fools!

Fact Sheet: The Estate (Inheritance) Tax

http://americansfortaxfairness.org/tax-fairness-briefing-booklet/fact-sheet-the-estate-inheritance-tax/

[Angry Dragon]

1. repubs love to fill their pockets and care nothing of this country .........

because they figure they have enough money to live anywhere they want

[bucolic_frolic]

2. It was thus in Czarist Russia

where opulence ruled

We are being pushed to the brink

Some people won't take it well or anymore

[GeoWilliam750]

3. I seem to recall a disagreement with the British about this

about 240 years ago.

Hereditary aristocracy is one of the more corrosive and destructive systems of government.

[Yavin4]

4. Thus ushering in a new class of royalty

We'll have a ruling class consisting solely of super wealthy people for generations to come.

[mitty14u2]

5. How Wal-Marts Waltons Maintain Their Billionaire Fortune: Taxes

Alice Walton’s mother and brother poured more than $9 billion into trusts since 2003 that fund charitable projects like Crystal Bridges and are also designed to protect gifts to heirs from taxation. Another Walton pioneered a tax-avoidance maneuver that is now widely used by U.S. billionaires.

“I hate to say it, but the very rich pay very little in gift and estate tax,” said Jerome Hesch, a lawyer at Berger Singerman LLP in Miami who reviewed some of the Walton family’s trust filings for Bloomberg. “At the Waltons’ numbers, the savings are unbelievable.”

At the end of the 1990s, an effort to repeal the estate tax gathered force, supported by a group of billionaire families and their lobbyists at Patton Boggs LLP, a Washington law firm. Walton Enterprises paid Patton Boggs to lobby on tax matters during that time.

A Patton Boggs lawyer, Aubrey Rothrock, said in a statement that the Waltons’ lobbying supported “private foundation reforms to create new incentives for charitable giving” and did not involve “the specific issue of repealing the estate tax.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-09-12/how-wal-mart-s-waltons-maintain-their-billionaire-fortune-taxes

[Sunlei]

6. why is trump worried?, he's never paid any taxes.

[hfojvt]

7. the funny thing about this

in a really sad way

Is that Trump and company will NOT save as much by abolishing the estate tax as they saved when Obama and the Democrats gutted the estate tax in 2012.

That link says that the estate tax brings in $8.5 billion a year.

It used to, before Obama got elected, bring in $70 billion a year. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x30476

So, tax cut from Trump that we are supposed to wail and gnash out teeth about - $8.5 billion per year

Tax cut from our hero Obama (and voted FOR by such progressive stalwarts as Bernie Sanders and Tammy Baldwin) - $61.5 billion per year.

Of course, the estate tax used to be even higher before Bill Clinton's tax cuts of 1997, cut more than $10 billion a year from the estate tax. http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2665533

[eppur_se_muova]

8. Here's the inspiration for the estate tax ...

Henrietta Howland "Hetty" Green (née Robinson; November 21, 1834 – July 3, 1916),[1] nicknamed the "Witch of Wall Street", was an American businesswoman and financier known as "the richest woman in America" during the Gilded Age. Known for both her wealth and her miserliness, she was the lone woman to amass a fortune when other major financiers were men.[2]
***
... After Hetty learned that Sylvia Howland had willed most of her $2 million estate (equivalent to $30,970,000 in 2015) to charity, Hetty challenged the will's validity in court by producing an earlier will which allegedly left the entire estate to Hetty, and included a clause invalidating any subsequent wills. The case, Robinson v. Mandell, which is notable as an early example of the forensic use of mathematics, was ultimately decided against Robinson after the court ruled that the clause invalidating future wills, and Sylvia's signature to it, were forgeries.[5] ,,,
***
... When her cousins tried to have her indicted for forgery based on the Robinson v. Mandell decision, the couple moved overseas to London, where they lived in the Langham Hotel. ...
***
Hetty Green's stinginess was legendary. She was said never to turn on the heat or use hot water. She wore one old black dress and undergarments that she changed only after they had been worn out, did not wash her hands and rode in an old carriage. She ate mostly pies that cost fifteen cents. One tale claims that Green spent half a night searching her carriage for a lost stamp worth two cents. Another asserts that she instructed her laundress to wash only the dirtiest parts of her dresses (the hems) to save money on soap.[7]

Green conducted much of her business at the offices of the Seaboard National Bank in New York, surrounded by trunks and suitcases full of her papers; she did not want to pay rent for her own office. Later unfounded rumors claimed that she ate only oatmeal, heated on the office radiator. Possibly because of the stiff competition of the mostly male business environment and partly because of her usually dour dress (due mainly to frugality, but perhaps in part related to her Quaker upbringing), she was given the nickname "the Witch of Wall Street".[2]
***
Her frugality extended to family life. When her son Ned broke his leg as a child, Hetty tried to have him admitted to a free clinic for the poor.[3] Mythic accounts have her storming away after being recognized; her biographer Slack says that she paid her bill and took her son to other doctors. His leg did not heal properly and, after years of treatment, it had to be amputated.[3]
***
When her grown children left home, Green moved repeatedly among small apartments in Brooklyn Heights and Hoboken, New Jersey,[2] mainly to avoid establishing a residence permanent enough to attract the attention of tax officials in any state. In her old age, she developed a bad hernia, but refused to have an operation because it cost $150. ...
***
On July 3, 1916, Hetty Green died at age 81 at her son's New York City home.[8] According to her longstanding "World's Greatest Miser" entry in the Guinness Book of World Records, she died of apoplexy after arguing with a maid over the virtues of skimmed milk. ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetty_Green

Wants to amass a fortune, even resorting to dishonest means. Doesn't want to share with anyone. Doesn't want to do any public good. Doesn't want to pay even minimal taxes. A real Repubican role model.

[OKNancy]

9. this is not breaking news - Locking

THis is an analysis article. It's not breaking.
Please re-post in G.D. or Editorials and Other Articles