Dem
47
GOP
53
The Washington Post, which used to be sort of moderately lefty, is now owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos. It congratulated Swiss voters for yesterday rejecting a measure imposing a 50% inheritance tax on assets above about $62 million. The money would have been used to fight climate change. Is there a connection between approval of letting large inheritances escape taxation and having a billionaire running the Post? We don't know. We're just reporting what the Post had to say.
The editorial said: "The Swiss understood that taking that away would hurt even those without huge inheritances." How, pray tell? Ok, one potential problem is rich people moving to Dubai, Abu Dhabi, or Singapore, but an exit tax equal to the inheritance tax would fix that. For the record, the U.S. has an exit tax but it covers only unrealized capital gains.
The editorial also said evaluating fine art would be complicated. Guess what? In the U.S., fine art in someone's estate is most definitely part of the estate and taxed if the estate exceeds the threshold. It has been like that since, well, forever. How can it be valued? Well, call in a couple of art auction houses and have them estimate what it would bring, then average them.
The editorial ends by saying voters need to ask the 2028 presidential candidates whether they want the estate tax to go up or down or stay the same. We would have phrased it more like: "Do the voters want to allow the spoiled children of billionaires to become billionaires themselves because they lucked into the right parents?" Of all the taxes around, one of the easiest to defend is the estate tax or inheritance tax. Taxing incomes is somewhat unfair because the person being taxed earned the money himself or herself. But taxing very large estates or inheritances prevents people who may never have earned a cent on their own from becoming billionaires by dint of having rich parents and nothing more. (V)