Estate Tax Is Still An Issue

With all of the current focus on proposed changes to the income tax laws, such as making corporate dividends tax free, we need to remember that the issue of repealing the estate (aka death or inheritance) tax is still too important to overlook. The threshold for taxable estates will be getting higher each year until the tax doesn't apply to anyone passing away in 2010. However, the tax will pop back to life in 2011, with a taxable threshold of one million dollars, the same as it is right now.

There are still plenty of people, such as Bill Gates, Sr, who support the concept of having the government redistribute all wealth when people pass on. Whether this endorsement of a plank in the Communist Manifesto means Mr. Gates is a full fledged commie, I don't know. I do know that such confiscation of personal wealth is wrong. I haven't heard Bill Gates, Jr. state his opinion on his father's leftist views; but I doubt he is too worried. He has already protected his wealth through a series of trusts and foundations in the same manner as the Kennedy Klan did to preserve Joseph Kennedy's bootlegging and stock scam fortune for his descendents. Such tactics have enabled Teddy Kennedy to safely espouse confiscatory taxes on everybody else.

KMK
- posted by Kerry M. Kerstetter, MBA~CPA~ATP~ATA @ 1/25/2003 02:22:00 PM Send this post: