CatHedral
Well-Known Member
Please describe the effects of dissolving the legislative branch.
Defund Social Security
- Thread starter Fogdog
- Start date
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
LMAO. Im sure it is a coincidence that right wing propaganda trolls are snow flaking about Biden taking a tax break on his book when this came out on the propagandists Erik Prince.So your saying that Biden followed the law? One that was kept in place by the Republicans?
Did he pay less than $1000 in total federal taxes?
https://www.rawstory.com/erik-prince-threatens-propublica-reporters-after-they-reveal-special-trusts-he-and-others-exploited-to-avoid-estate-taxes/
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Series: The Secret IRS Files
Inside the Tax Records of the .001%
It's well known, at least among tax lawyers and accountants for the ultrawealthy: The estate tax can be easily avoided by exploiting a loophole unwittingly created by Congress three decades ago. By using special trusts, a rarefied group of Americans have taken advantage of this loophole, reducing government revenues and fueling inequality.
There is no way for the public to know who uses these special trusts aside from when they've been disclosed in lawsuits or securities filings. There's also been no way to quantify just how much in estate tax has been lost to them, though, in 2013, the lawyer who pioneered the use of the most common one — known as the grantor retained annuity trust, or GRAT — estimated they may have cost the U.S. Treasury about $100 billion over the prior 13 years.
As Congress considers cracking down on GRATs and other trusts to help fund President Joe Biden's domestic agenda, a new analysis by ProPublica based on a trove of tax information about thousands of the wealthiest Americans sheds light on just how widespread the use of special trusts to dodge the estate tax has become.
More than half of the nation's 100 richest individuals have used GRATs and other trusts to avoid estate tax, the analysis shows. Among them: former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg; Leonard Lauder, the son of cosmetics magnate Estée Lauder; Stephen Schwarzman, a founder of the private equity firm Blackstone; Charles Koch and his late brother, David, the industrialists who have underwritten libertarian causes and funded lobbying efforts to roll back the estate tax; and Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs. (Powell Jobs' Emerson Collective is among ProPublica's largest donors.)
More than a century ago amid soaring inequality and the rise of stratospherically wealthy families such as the Mellons and Rockefellers, Congress created the estate tax as a way to raise money and clip the fortunes of the rich at death. Lawmakers later added a gift tax as a means of stopping wealthy people from passing their fortunes on to their children and grandchildren before death. Nowadays, 99.9% of Americans never have to worry about these taxes. They only hit individuals passing more than $11.7 million, or couples giving more than $23.4 million, to their heirs. The federal government imposes a roughly 40% levy on amounts above those figures before that wealth is passed on to heirs.
For her part, Powell Jobs has decried as “dangerous for a society" the early 20th century fortunes of the Mellons, Rockefellers and others. “I'm not interested in legacy wealth buildings, and my children know that," she told The New York Times last year. “Steve wasn't interested in that. If I live long enough, it ends with me."
Nonetheless, after the death of her husband in 2011, Powell Jobs used a series of GRATs to pass on around a half a billion dollars, estate-tax-free, to her children, friends and other family, according to the tax records and interviews with her longtime attorney. By using the GRATs, she avoided at least $200 million in estate and gift taxes.
Her attorney, Larry Sonsini, said Powell Jobs did this so that her children would have cash to pay estate taxes when she dies and they inherit “nostalgic and hard assets," such as real estate, art and a yacht. (At 260 feet, Venus is among the larger pleasure ships in the world.) Without the $500 million or so passed through the trusts, he said, Powell Jobs' heirs would have to sell stock that she intends to give to charity to pay her estate tax bill.
In 1990, Congress accidentally created GRATs when it closed another estate tax loophole that was popular at the time. The IRS challenged the maneuver but lost in court.
This month, the House and Senate are hammering out proposals to raise revenue to help pay for the Biden administration's plans to expand the social safety net. The legislative blueprint released by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., would defang GRATs and other trusts, which would still be legal but no longer be as useful for estate tax avoidance. If the provision makes it into law, “it would put a major dent in GRATs," said Bob Lord, an Arizona attorney who specializes in trusts and estates.
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has proposed going further in undercutting estate tax avoidance tools. But the prospect of any reform is uncertain, as Democrats on Capitol Hill struggle to find the votes to pass the package of spending and tax changes.
GRATs are commonly described by tax lawyers as a “heads I win, tails we tie" proposition. If the investment placed in the GRAT soars in value, that increase passes to an heir without being subject to future estate tax. If the investment doesn't go up, the wealthy person can simply try again and again until they succeed, leading many users to have multiple GRATs going at a time.
For example, Herb Simon, founder of the country's biggest shopping mall empire and owner of the Indiana Pacers, was one of the most prolific GRAT creators in records reviewed by ProPublica. Since 2000, he has hatched dozens of the trusts, often more than one a year. In an interview with The Indianapolis Star in 2017, the octogenarian Simon said, “It's always a big tax problem" for the next generation when someone dies, “but we've worked that tax problem. We won't have a problem with that."
A spokesperson for Simon didn't respond to questions for this article.
Mentions of these trusts have periodically surfaced in the press after being disclosed in securities filings, as was the case with trusts held by Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. In 2013, Bloomberg News published a groundbreaking series on GRATs, mining securities filings and other records to reveal how the mega-rich, including casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and such families as Walmart's Waltons, had perfected the use of the device.
Porter Wright, a law firm that offers estate planning services, told existing and potential clients it was “critical" to evaluate opportunities because “the window may close very soon. There are important and time sensitive issues which could substantially impact the amount of wealth you are able to transfer free of estate and gift tax to future generations."
Fogdog
Well-Known Member
Trump is going to jail for tax fraud. So I don't blame him for not wanting to incriminate himself. Typical of Republifrauds -- they claim they are innocent when we can all see what they are doing.
Fogdog
Well-Known Member
Not surprised that a right wing heel would be unable to distinguish following laws and paying legal obligation in taxes from outright tax fraud that Trump is being hauled out into the lights to face the music
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Fogdog
Well-Known Member
lock them up
Three Berries
Well-Known Member
Herb & Suds
Well-Known Member
Who dat?
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
lol we will see. The list is too long (because it is so in depth) to post the entire thing. It is funny how much it must suck to have to make a living protecting the orange idiot 2 impeached loser ex-POTUS.Tax fraud eh? haven't they been trying to get Trump for tax fraud for about 40 years?
https://www.justsecurity.org/75032/litigation-tracker-pending-criminal-and-civil-cases-against-donald-trump/
Three Berries
Well-Known Member
All will evaporate away when the world wakes up. You are just trying to hide the crimes of the current ChYna installed Mainchain Candidate and hope no one notices. bidan is portrayed by an actor and filmed at Castle Rock studios
Three Berries
Well-Known Member
Just get Congress to pay back the money they borrowed. No problem right as long as we can pass Trillions in new spending at ZERO tax load.....
Three Berries
Well-Known Member
The IRS has ALL of Trumps tax returns. Don't you think the IRS has looked over them trying to find something out of sorts?
CatHedral
Well-Known Member
Oops misquoted you, sorry
CatHedral
Well-Known Member
This neocon insistence on zero tax load is fraudulent. We need to get past voodoo economics, a Repug mainstay since they swore in that first showman. We have forty years of experience to show it does not work unless youre a kleptocrat.
High wage earners, both corporate and individual, need to be much more effectively taxed, without the dishonest tax aversiveness that is the province of today’s GOP.
Three Berries
Well-Known Member
BUT it's the Repugs that are saying BidAns claim of ZeRO taxes is false! And even some Dems now. And any corporate or company taxes are paid the customers, you aren't going to hurt the company any until you run it out of business. Then it's NO taxes and NO payroll and NO products or services....
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
Saying things racist doesn't make your lies true.
lol curious.
$400k and under are what Biden said that they would not be raising taxes on.
Three Berries
Well-Known Member
I would not doubt one bit you believe this 100%. Anyone using you sig links would know you been cucked and still pushing the RussiaN HaoX lies. LOL it's going to be a hard landing for you sheeps.
hanimmal
Well-Known Member
Your random capitalization gives you extra credibility too!
But, I would believe the people who plead guilty and the random assortment of 12 American jurors that kept finding Trump's criminal syndicate guilty over some sock puppet propaganda troll pushing the Big Lies that you have been since you started posting on this account here.
Fogdog
Well-Known Member
Trump became president to avoid jail. You know this is true.Tax fraud eh? haven't they been trying to get Trump for tax fraud for about 40 years?
CatHedral
Well-Known Member
postpone
garybo
Well-Known Member
What is a left-winger?