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It hardly matters. If you can still pull off financial shenanigans that Trump pere did- siphoning money into his childrens' bank accounts via accounting shenani
by roywiggins 8y ago
It hardly matters. If you can still pull off financial shenanigans that Trump pere did- siphoning money into his childrens' bank accounts via accounting shenanigans, without triggering gift or inheritance taxes- then you can pass a large chunk of your wealth down before you die.
- krastanov 8y agoThe fact that criminals exist (and that occasionally laws are not well enforced) does not mean we should just give up on making good laws. Rather it should inform how we design and enforce the laws.
- wait_a_minute 8y agoYeah, I wasn't even commenting on the fact that people try to get around laws. I was just commenting on the philosophy of why people shouldn't be so upset if an inheritance or estate tax is even much larger than what it currently is.
- roywiggins 8y agoCertainly. What needs to change wholesale is the attitude. If we enforced the existing laws assiduously, we'd be halfway to solving the problem. I am fatalistic towards attempts to fix this with laws and taxes because we can't even keep the IRS sufficiently funded to enforce the tax law as it stands. Without a complete turn-around in the incentives in Congress, there's really very little actual laws seem to do. It's not that laws are sometimes not enforced, it's that there's an entire echelon of lawbreaking in which the law is hardly ever enforced. Nobody worries about going to jail for engineering complex tax schemes designed to shield themselves from billions in tax obligations. https://www.propublica.org/article/ultrawealthy-taxes-irs-internal-revenue-service-global-high-wealth-audits https://www.propublica.org/article/ultrawealthy-taxes-irs-in...