Re: how to compare living standards


"tonyp" <tonyp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:88idnVa85t1NL6vZnZ2dneKdnZydnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxx

"Jim Blair" <jeb@xxxxxxxx> wrote

Er, you are defending the tax that your jet-setting heiress
can pay a few grand to her $200,000 a year lawyer to avoid.
And on the grounds of "fairness"!!!

TP:

Will you tell me, please, whether the heiress gets exactly the same
control
of daddy's money regardless whether:
1) She inherits outright, or
2) That fancy lawyer does his legal magic?

If there are laws, or loopholes therein, that allow Paris Hilton to have
total control of her daddy's estate for practical purposes, but not for
tax
purposes, you ought to be able to give an example or two. I assume you
can, because I assume you're not just making *** up.

Hi,

I am not a tax lawyer, so I get my information from people like Grinch (who
is) and also have had some experience on the other end of this.
(If I were an expert on the subject I could probably make a lot more money
than I do as a chemist)

If the estate tax were effective and that 50-90% rate was actually being
collected from the rich families, how did Paris Hilton and Teddy Kennedy and
dozens of others you can name get the money they are spending?

I knew a "rich" widow (around $1 million in assets when the estate tax
exemption was in the $600,000 range) who, late in her life, gave her
children the maximum gift each year (10K or so) and then had a lawyer draw
up some kind of trust. Before she died at age 94, her children had become
the trustees of her trust and they used the trust to pay her expenses.
After she died, the trust was divided up between her children with no
probation or estate tax. I don't know the detalis of the trust.

And I remember when Paul Molitor played for the Milwaukee Brewers and was
traded to another team. There was some financial dealing, not with Paul
Molitor, but with the Paul Molitor Foundation lawyers. From the news
reports, I got the impression that the Paul Molitor Foundation existed to
manage the financial affairs of the baseball player of the same name, and
they (not the team he played for) paid him a salary. The baseball team paid
their money, not to Paul Molitor, but to his foundation which then paid his
expenses in addition to his salary. As I say, this is not my field of
expertise, and I was reading about this in the sports section of our
newspaper.

And when my family (me and my wife) wealth passed the $650,000 mark when
that was the estate tax deduction, we were advised to (and did) pay a lawyer
about $1500 to move our assets into a trust and make our beneficiaries the
trust (rather than each other), and then make our daughter and grandchildren
trustees. We were assured that this would insure that when either or both
of us die, our estate will avoid both probation and federal and Wisconsin
estate taxes. The document is several pages long and I don't understand it
but it has a clause about giving the surviving trustees the option of
taking only a part of the trust (i.e the estate tax deduction limit) and
keeping the rest in the trust which can then passed on or taken at a later
date or used to pay expenses or some such.

Since then, the exemption has increased to well above our family assets, so
my $1500 was likely wasted :-(.

That is, unless I were to become a lot richer :-)


After you present your examples, we can discuss whether the proper
approach
is to abolish the estate tax, or close the loopholes.

-- TP

I assume that overall, foundations make better use of money than the US
government does, so I would not advocate abolishing them, or changing tax
laws so as to cut off their establishment or income.



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jim blair (jeblair@xxxxxxxx) Madison Wisconsin USA.
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