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If you're a New York multimillionaire, you now have another incentive to stay alive. A change this month in New York's estate tax, which was billed as tax relief for the wealthy, contains a hidden wrinkle that could leave some multimillionaires with a much bigger surprise tax upon their death. Certain estates could even wind up with a tax rate of 164 percent on portions of their estates, according to one tax expert. The changes were intended to ease the tax bill for wealthy New Yorkers and prevent them from fleeing to lower-tax states. A report from the Tax Foundation...

With the current relatively generous federal estate tax exemption of $5.25 million for 2013 and $5.34 million for 2014, you surely don't have any estate tax worries. Right? Not necessarily! It turns out that 19 states and the District of Columbia impose their own estate and/or inheritance taxes, and most of them have exemptions well below the federal amount. If you live in one of these places, your estate might be exempt from the federal estate tax but still exposed to a significant state death tax hit. Yikes! Here's what you need to know.

I want to introduce you to a magnificent document that far too few people have read. But before I introduce it to you, I need to remind you of something written in Federalist #84, that English history is American history. Hamilton specifically sites several(major) English documents that are important pre-cursors to the US Constitution. The earliest of said documents in that chain is the magnificent 1100 Charter of Liberties. Hamilton cites Magna Carta as the earliest, but the M.C. is really reliant upon the 1100 Charter as a precedent. In this Charter of Liberties, you will see, among other things,...

An abiding lesson of the Obama Presidency is that no tax increase is ever enough. So it's not surprising that the President's new budget includes an increase in the death tax only three months after the last increase. In January Mr. Obama and Republicans agreed to tax estates at 40% with an exemption of $5 million ($10 million for couples). That was an increase from 35% and a $5 million exemption. Now only weeks later he's again looking for more, as his budget proposes to raise the rate to 45% and reduce the exemption to $3.5 million. Mr. Obama's budget...

President Obama seeks in his new budget to raise the estate tax, which was permanently lowered in the Jan. 1 “fiscal cliff” deal between the administration and congressional Republicans. Mr. Obama’s proposal would reinstitute the estate tax in 2018 at tax rates imposed in 2009, when about 3 in 1,000 people were subject to the tax. It would raise about $79 billion over 10 years. The plan would drop the per-person exemption to $3.5 million from $5.25 million this year, and raise the top tax rate to 45 percent from 40 percent.

Everyone in Washington, D.C., who works on taxes is consumed with one area or another of reform: international provisions, the corporate rate, full business expensing, the spread between the top personal and corporate rates, etc. All of these — and many others besides — are vital parts of comprehensive tax reform. But there’s one area that’s rarely mentioned, despite its economic importance and despite the fact that it’s a deeply immoral blot on our system that 70 percent of Americans want gone for good: the death tax. The fiscal cliff and its legislative aftermath created a “new normal” in the...

Not so long ago, states were plugged into a money gusher: They could charge estate taxes without costing their taxpayers a dime -- the money came straight out of the federal treasury. The set up made states billions of dollars -- at least until 2001 when Congress passed the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (EGTRRA), which put an end to one of the sweetest deals Washington ever gave state governments. That deal, struck in 1926, worked like this: Every dollar (up to a point) that someone paid in state estate taxes would be a dollar they didn't have...

Is it "fair" that the federal government be able to take more than half the wealth created by estates of more than $3.5 million at the time of death? Of course it is, says the left - even if 97% of farmers and ranchers will be impacted. Fox News: ****** Two decades ago, Kester paid the IRS $2 million when he inherited a 22,000-acre cattle ranch from his grandfather. Come January, the tax burden on his children will be more than $13 million. For supporters of a high estate tax, which is imposed on somebody's estate after death, Kester is...

the estate tax -- also known as the "death tax."... set to soar at the beginning of 2013 ... The estate tax dates back to 1916 when then-President Woodrow Wilson imposed the tax of 1 to 10 percent on the wealthy because World War I reduced federal government revenues. Under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the tax rose to 77 percent, as Congress tried to prevent wealth from becoming concentrated among a few powerful and super-rich families. Ironically, many nations historically more concerned with class and wealth -- namely Russia and China -- have since abandoned their estate taxes.

Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog The following rich liberals have all used legal tax shelters to legally lower their taxes The following rich liberals have all used legal tax shelters to legally lower their taxes:Debbie Wasserman SchultzThe Weekly Standard reports:Disclosure forms reveal that Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a member of Congress from Florida, previously held funds with investments in Swiss banks, foreign drug companies, and the state bank of India. This revelation comes mere days after the Democratic chair attacked presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for holding money in Swiss bank accounts in the past.Nancy PelosiThe Daily...

I’d like somebody to get rid of the death tax. That’s what I want. I don’t want to get taxed just because I died. I just don’t think its right. If I give something to my kid, I already paid the tax, why do I do I have to pay again just because I died? -- Whoopi Goldberg ______________________________________ “This study confirms that the cost of the estate tax far exceeds any benefits it produces.” So begins “Cost and Consequences of the Federal Estate Tax” published last week by the Republican Staff of the Joint Economic Committee, whose vice chairman,...

That's one way to increase tax revenue from the rich. If you can't get Congress to pass the Buffett Rule, why not just start taxing phantom income instead?They want their money, even if you don't get yours. The object under discussion is “Canyon,” a masterwork of 20th-century art created by Robert Rauschenberg that Sonnabend’s children inherited when she died in 2007.Because the work, a sculptural combine, includes a stuffed bald eagle, a bird under federal protection, the heirs would be committing a felony if they ever tried to sell it. So their appraisers have valued the work at zero. But...

On Jan. 1, 2013, the estate tax is set to climb to as high as 55 percent — among the highest in the world economy — with the exclusion rate dropping to just $1 million, making 2013 a bad year to die for small businesses owners and the wealthy. The estate tax — often called the death tax — had been on the decline due to the Bush tax cuts, even reaching zero in 2010. Since then, it has risen back to 35 percent, with an $5 million exclusion, where it remains today. As blogged by conservative organization Americans for...

Current Law The 2001 tax relief bill (EGTRRA), drastically reduced the impact of the death tax over the course of a decade, so that it was eliminated entirely for one year in 2010 — a good year to die, joked a number of pundits. The bill lowered marginal rates and increased the applicable exclusion amount, but it also included a provision allowing individuals to carry over exclusion dollars that were unused by their spouse at the time of his or her death. This “portability” measure effectively increased the applicable exclusion for many households, in some instances putting millions of dollars...

President Barack Obama's promise to raise the estate tax by 5 percent to 55 percent should he be re-elected in November is “not just wrong, it’s criminal,” legendary singer Pat Boone told Newsmax.TV. "People that have worked hard, people who have saved, paid their taxes, set something away and now want to leave it to their family—if they have the bad judgment to die, the government will step over and say: ‘Thank you. We will take 55 percent of that,’” Boone told Newsmax in an exclusive interview on Friday. “And if you have to sell your business, have to sell...

What are the tax implications of the zombie apocalypse? The only certainties in life are death and taxes, but how do you handle the taxes when death doesn't go quite as planned? Law professor Adam Chodorow takes a stab at estate planning for the undead in perhaps the only legal paper to cite both the Internal Revenue Code and Weekend at Bernie's II. Chodorow, a professor at Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, authored the paper "Death and Taxes...and Zombies," which will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Iowa Law Review. Chodorow notes that, while the...

When Steve Jobs died last month, he left $6.78 billion of stock in both Apple and Disney presumably to his wife and family. His widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, may not have a better time to sell off the billions of stock and avoid $867 million in capital gains taxes. Financial planners told Bloomberg that Powell Jobs and the family should quickly divest and diversify its holdings to avoid higher taxes. Capital gains taxes are set to rise in 2013 from 15 to 20 percent, and Americans with a high income may also be subjected to a 3.8 percent tax on...

Sometimes I just can't help pitying rich folks. Lately it's because the new tax law gives them yet another high-class quandary: Should they rush to give away everything to their kids during the next two years in order to save future estate tax? That's precisely what some financial pundits are now suggesting they do. Their advice grows out of the estate tax overhaul President Obama signed in December. It raises the tax-free limit on lifetime gifts from $1 million to a hefty $5 million ($10 million for married couples) before a gift tax applies. When it does, the rate is...

The Wall Street Journal has brought up yet another argument against the ebb and flow of the estate tax debate this week. The crux of it is that the uncertainty over how large the government vultures will be when they come to feast on your corpse has some business owners spending more preparing for the estate tax than their families will eventually lose. What’s unavoidable to many family businesses, however, is the cost of lawyers, accountants, family business advisers and business appraisers—and all that, owners say, has increased in the past decade as the estate-tax rate has continually changed. Trade...

A top House Democrat said Monday there's room to revise the contentious tax-cut package hammered out between the White House and Senate Republicans. Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) predicted the House would ultimately pass a tax-cut bill this month, but not before Democratic critics have had a chance to amend certain language — particularly a 35 percent estate tax provision that exempts the first $5 million of estates. "There certainly seems to me to be some room for a change which may or may not be perceived by some to be significant," Hoyer told reporters at the National Press Club....