This is nonsense. Any married couple (or person) with a high net worth should plan their estate accordingly. There are ways to minimize estate taxes. If they chose to not plan their estate, why is the government to blame for them being wealthy and foolish? This whole wealthy-getting-screwed-by-estate-taxes is mythical. People with high net worth are rarely foolish.
Name one. The American Farm Bureau could not, as posted earlier in the thread. You must have not bothered to even read it. I advise you to read it in the future in the interest of avoiding asking questions that have already been answered to spare yourself the embarrassment.
Chuckie, reading is fundamental. From page 3: Yep, poor mom & pop and their $5 million farm - their children will have to be content with a few million in cash - the horror!
Geez Sam guess I don't. I only spent 6 years in the 90's working for an Ag firm. But I suppose you have a lot of "book knowlege" which is important for something. I know someone has to pay for it and it's those of us who pay taxes. The subsidies are set up so milk doesn't cost $6/gallon, so all of us can provide it for our familes at dinner time at a reasonable cost. Maybe you can get some "Fresh" Russian milk. Came straight from a cow a couple months ago. Bet that sounds really yummy. let's see from the cow to the dairy to the loading dock, to a port somewhere in the US where it gets the OK to be shipped in. Again it's really nice how you argue. Just attack a person. It's obvious you're an angry person. Go ahead and vent on here. I'm sure it makes you feel better.
Robert Sakata had to sell most of his family farm paying estate taxes. Here is the myth buster. http://www.fb.org/views/focus/fo2000/fo0710.html
Paying estate taxes DOES NOT MEAN selling the farm. All these high net worth farmers have to do is PLAN THEIR ESTATE. For instance whatever estate taxes are owed can be paid for by life insurnace on the second to die. The cost for the life insurance would be pennies on the dollars if they planned early enough. See how simple this all is.
Reading is fundamental Chuckie, and by that I mean reading comprehension. The 4% are % that are subject to the estate tax. There is no evidence to support that they had to sell the farm to pay it (and - good heavens, find more productive use for capital if they do).
Guess again. Robert Sakata says the death tax may be so high on this valuable property that he may have to sell half of the farm when the day comes to pay the tax. This is f*cking braindead bullsh*t. In his situtation, the government allows the land to be valued against its current use versus its best use (selling to developers). I think the special valuation rule would lower the farm valuation by a max of $870,000. If this is not enough, then the braindead Robert Sakata should contact an estate attorney and proceed from there. As I said in a previous thread, life insurance solves this problem.
Chuckie, I will repeat this for the last time. READING IS FUNDAMENTAL. how do you get from "say I may have to" to "had to sell"?
My favorite part is poor Robert Sakata worrying about how he's going to have to sell his farm to pay the death tax and then be out on skid row I guess. Of course, being dead is a precondition to all this so I'm not sure why he's worried. LOL Edit: looks like this poor sap is 47 years old! Oh no, poor Bob Sakata better rustle up an estate attorney real quick! Or else hundreds of people will be unemployed. http://www.fb.org/news/fbn/99/04_26/html/death.html Why doesn't congress pass a special Bob Sakata midnight renumeration bill that calls for when he dies, every unemployed worker from his farm would get a 10 million dollar cash payment. For an estimated 300 workers, this is only 3 billion dollars, and would be a fraction of the annual cost to the government for repealing the estate tax, lol.
I wonder what snopes has to say about poor ol' Robert Sakata. This smells of a paid-for-news-by-uncle-sam news.
Wow, milk subsidies are set-up to keep families from starving? Then why is the US government hauling Canada before the WTO for illegally subsidizing milk prices and driving prices down? Help me out, you're the ag firm guy. And, rather than being given to keep prices low, dairy subsidies, like most agricultural subsidies - are given because prices are too low That's what happens with subsidies, you end up with overproduction and you basically pay people to make useless goods. Are you positing that since milk is perishable and has inelastic demand it's a natural monopoly or something? LOL, well if that is true I guess we'll have to set up a national Milk corporation then to keep prices low. Somehow I think we'll manage without it.
Let's just burn the place to the ground and start over. Seriously. The U.S. class system is far too convoluted and stratified to be improved. EDIT: Dear CIA and other law enforcement agencies who may or may not be monitoring internet communications, I was just kidding about the whole "burn the place to the ground" thing. Y'know...just jokin'. Please don't hurt me. love, thadeus
There's this assumption that the family farm is this idyllic lifestyle that has to be preserved for the good of America, but the reality is that the vast majority of farming in this country is done by giant corporations. And even then, they operate inefficiently, or else we wouldn't need subsidies. I don't know that farming and ranching such essential businesses that we need to subsidize them to the degree we do, when we're content to let the free market system play out in other industries, even at the loss of US jobs.
When asked, the American Farm Bureau was unable to find even a single instance where a family farm has liquidated due to the estate tax. Myth appears to be an appropriate word.
I would be very surprised if some organization did not look into all of the cases. If such cases did exists, the right wing think tanks would be very hot and bothered about finding them. This research if it backed their desired conclusion would have been prominently displayed for all to see.
Death to the Death Tax? By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 15, 2005; 8:45 AM In reading about the House repeal of the estate tax, one sentence jumped out at me. By a 238-194 vote, the House rejected a Democratic alternative that would have shielded $3.5 million of an estate's value from taxation -- enough to exempt 99.7 percent of estates from the tax, according to the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution. Seems like a dream for Democratic talking points. In most tax debates during this administration, President Bush and the GOP say their tax cuts will help everyone, the Democrats say they will disproportionately benefit the rich, everyone trots out their charts and the argument rages. Democrats say trickle-down, Republicans say class warfare, yadda yadda yadda. But here we have a case in which the Republicans have gone on record as trying to protect the top 0.3 percent, the richest households by far in the US of A. I'm not taking a position on the estate tax, but I do think the vote on this little amendment clarifies a pretty fundamental difference between the parties. I doubt, though, that this is a big voting issue. The people who care about what the GOP calls the "death tax" care passionately -- and are generally well-heeled enough to write checks to politicians. The people who will never have a big enough estate to worry about taxation don't spend much time agonizing over the issue, as opposed to the state of their kid's school and whether the local doctor will accept Grandma's Medicare. In fact, some of them may like the idea of not taxing estates because they aspire to be rich someday. But I'd be surprised if we didn't hear more from Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and friends about the top 0.3 percent, particularly as the measure moves to the Senate.
