This title is wildly misleading. The problem isn't the oil spill it's the treatment of step up basis on the death of her husband. That's where the real awfulnes

This title is wildly misleading. The problem isn't the oil spill it's the treatment of step up basis on the death of her husband. That's where the real awfulness creeps in to this sequence of events. You have a person with this basic trajectory: Step 1 - Gets a $1 billion dollar asset, but claims it's worth $1.2 billion. No tax due, basis set at $1.2bn. Step 2 - Sells asset for $1 billion, which is what it's worth. Says hey I just lost $200MM Step 3 - Uses that loss to offset real gains from other businesses. Doesn't pay tax on anything at all It's Step 1 that's the problem. For fucking insane reasons no tax at all is due at all in this step AND there's no unrealized capital gains transferred either, so the billion dollars of wealth created will never be taxed as having accrued to anyone ever AND there's an incentive to overvalue it since there's no tax due. In a normal world people don't pretend assets they get are worth more than the really are since that's a gain they'll have to pay taxes on. This state of affairs is fundamentally indefensible. Even in our fucked up world of influence peddling I'm amazed the plutocrats were able to make this happen.