The "Death Tax" con job

[DFW]

18. The limits must have gone way up in recent years

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.