Krugman's Perspective on the Deal

[BlueStreak]

65. No question about it.

You always look for the cheapest way to get your money unsheltered / transferred to heirs. When you have millions, you usually don't mind keeping in sheltered for a time, but eventually you want to get your money free and clear of taxes, so you look for ways to do that as cheap as possible. That is the essence of high-income "tax planning" aka legal tax evasion.

This monstrosity of a bill is like a balloon. You push down in one place and it pops up in another. The nominal tax rate, cap gains rate and dividend rates all went up a little for the rich. So they will just get more aggressive about sheltering until they can open up the next loophole. And the estate tax got opened up nicely for the 1% (not so much for the 0.1%)

isn't it interesting that they can all support "chained CPI", which says that if steak gets more expensive, you can switch to Tuna Helper? But they don't seem to be able to apply the same logic to the behavior of the super-rich. When one loophole gets more expensive, they switch to a different loophole. That $600 BN of revenue is bogus. I bet we won't see half of that.