Whether or not you agree that equality is a core American Value, the following is interesting.
Instead, it’s the nation’s richest families with the most to gain from repealing the tax. Just nine families could dodge $25.7 billion in taxes, and perhaps as much as $54.7 billion, if the estate tax were repealed, depending on whether the calculation uses the current maximum tax rate of 40 percent rate or the average effective tax rate for estates over $20 million.
The families pushing to repeal the tax include the Mars, Wegman, Cox, Taylor, Van Andel, DeVos, Bass, Schwab and Hall families. Four of these nine families have spent more than a million dollars apiece lobbying Congress to repeal the tax between 2012 and the first quarter of 2015, a new Public Citizen report, “Billionaires’ Bluff: How America’s Richest Families Hide Behind Small Businesses and Family Farms in Effort to Repeal Estate Tax,” shows.