Quote:
Originally Posted by bambino
They’ve already paid taxes on the money they EARNED. Why pay it twice? That’s punitive. It’s you that needs to brush up on things. And family members do work in the family business you meathead. .
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I've warned you about talking about things you have not researched ...
https://www.cbpp.org/research/federa...ral-estate-tax
Much of the money that wealthy heirs inherit would never face any taxation were it not for the estate tax. In fact, that’s one reason why policymakers created the estate tax in 1916: to serve as a backstop to the income tax,
taxing the income of wealthy taxpayers that would otherwise go completely untaxed.
Under the current tax system, capital gains tax is due on the appreciation of assets, such as real estate, stock, or an art collection, only when the owner “realizes” the gain (usually by selling the asset). Therefore, the increase in the value of an asset is never subject to income tax if the owner holds on to the asset until death.
[13]These unrealized capital gains account for a significant proportion of the assets held by estates — ranging from 32 percent for estates worth between $5 million and $10 million to as much as about 55 percent of the value of estates worth more than $100 million.[14] (See Figure 4.)
The estate tax also serves as a modest corrective to other tax rules that provide massive tax benefits to income from wealth, such as the fact that capital gains are taxed at lower rates than wages and salaries. The top 0.1 percent of taxpayers — those with incomes above $3.1 million — will receive 56 percent of the benefit of the preferential capital gains rates in 2017, worth more than $600,000 apiece.[15] Other tax rules allow part of the income of the very wealthiest to go completely untaxed, even with the estate tax.[16]
Since the estate tax serves, in part, to tax capital gains that have not otherwise been taxed, some people have proposed taxing estates at the top capital gains rate, currently 23.8 percent. This argument is flawed: the capital gains tax rates typically apply to nearly all capital gains income, whereas the estate tax applies only to the part of an estate that exceeds the exemption level. (The estate tax’s
average effective rate of 17 percent in 2017 is below the capital gains rate.)