Posted on 12/11/2012 6:29:48 PM PST by george76
New legislation that jumps the death tax to 55 percent of estates exceeding $1 million threatens 526,421 family farms, of about 25 percent of all farms in America.
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Farm values are largely tied up in non-liquid assets like land, buildings, and livestock. Many farm and ranch families would be forced to sell their assets to satisfy Washington Democrats' insatiable appetite for tax money. Up to 24 percent of America's farm and ranch families could be forced to hand over a large chunk of their heritage to the Internal Revenue Service when a family member dies. This would economically devastate rural communities
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
If Prop 13 went away, then my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) is that property taxes would once again be set at the city or county level.
Cities and counties could then compete for having the lowest property taxes and minimal services, or maximum property taxes and maximal services.
There's no reason why individual cities couldn't decide to just vote in local versions of Prop 13.
Except one, perhaps. That reason would be that it might be considered unconstitutional for two homeowners to be paying significantly different tax rates on similar homes in the same neighborhood just because one of them bought the house on a different date than the other. It may be that Prop. 13 exists so that such inequities can be written into law.
But it might also be the case that taxes are not treated like fees, etc. And so it may be that anything goes and individual cities could vote in local versions of Prop. 13. Or cities could implement fairer systems that still kept property taxes relatively low and allowed seniors to stay in their homes even if the assessed values soar.
One thing local cities could do is to make sure that property is reassessed every time it changes ownership. There needs to be a crackdown on complicated deals whereby property is transferred from one company to another in such a way that it doesn't count as a sale and so doesn't get reassessed.
If this causes businesses to cry foul, then those same cities can do what other cities do in other states: they can give specific businesses tax breaks in order to lure them in (or keep them in) their cities in hopes that the going concerns will generate other sources of income for the city in the way of sales tax, income tax on employees, increased property taxes, etc.
Three or four years ago I told someone I thought we would end up like Zimbabwe and he told me that it couldn’t happen here! Somehow I was not comforted by that opinion.
The best world news this year is the further liberalization of the Cuban economy.
Communism went away in Russia, is going away in China, and looks to be receding even in places like Cuba.
The goal posts have been moved on both ends of the economic spectrum. Yes it's bad news that we are moving further and further away from the possibility of reattaining the moderately regulated free market economy we once had. But it is good news that we are moving further and further away from a communist dictatorship. People are finally wising up to the fact that the Communist model is a failed one.
Unfortunately conservatives have been labeling everything left of ideologically pure libertarianism as socialism. So now everyone calls what they have in Western Europe as socialist when in fact it is just an over-regulated and over-taxed controlled capitalist economy.
That's certainly a bad thing, but at least it's not textbook socialism which no one but a few professors at Harvard are stupid enough to think would actually work in the real world.
Our choices going forward are various forms of capitalism that are regulated, taxed, and rigged by whoever happens to have sufficient money to bribe the right public officials.
It is more regulated, more taxed, and more rigged than we would like, but it isn't socialism and barring some horrible disaster will never be communism.
That is something to be at least moderately happy about.
Communism is as communism does. If you don’t see that the Obama government is making huge strides on reducing private property and privately held business- then I think you are in denial.
People are not waking up- and the communist of the world have depleted the resources and wealth of other countries and have found a new host: The United States.
I’ve always wondered about this. Can’t the farm owner put it into a son or daughter’s name to protect them from the IRS?
How so? Wasn't it the intent of the Republicans to put a time frame on the death tax in order to get Bush's 2001 tax cuts approved?
It would be subject to gift tax. With proper planning you could, over a period of years, transfer small portions of ownership without paying tax, but if the property is substantial you might need to start when the children are born.
My dad died in 1997. At that time anything over $600K was taxed at 55%. His will was set up exactly as Submareener described in post 11 above. $600K in assets went into a trust and the rest went to my mother. No tax was due until my mother passed.
My mother passed this year, so we got (tax wise) lucky. Since her estate was valued less than $5 million there will be no estate tax.
My wife's dad is still living, but probably doesn't have much time left. He owns a tree farm of about 1000 acres that will definitely be valued in excess of $1 million (the expected limit as of 1/1/13). His will leaves the farm to my wife and her sister, but leaves all other assets to his wife. If he dies and the farm is valued at $1300/acre then my wife and her sister will have to come up with $165K to pay the IRS.
Since her dad isn't leaving any cash the only option is probably to sell part of the land. My wife and her sister could buy part of the land from the estate to raise the cash, and that's probably what will happen, but there is no way to escape the tax monster.
Well, when the government decides what’s our property is theirs property by fiat, we’ll have greater issues to worry about than taxes.
To paraphrae John Galt; If your intent is to do me harm, bring guns!
When someone says 'communism' then usually mean communism de jure.
If we want to be very accurate then there never was and never will be communism because communism is a pipe dream that is impossible for humans to create.
What Russia was (and pretty much still is), what China was and is, and what Cuba was and is is a government controlled monopoly. An argument can be made that every economy throughout the history of the world has been some form of capitalist economy, however most of them were monopolistic forms of capitalism.
Capitalism isn't a choice. It is how humans interact with one another. When things are going well then lots of people have lots of control over various parcels of land and various goods and services. When things aren't going so well then a very few people have control over vast amounts of land and resources. Normally those "very few people" form some sort of government to rationalize and justify their position.
The good news about our economy is anyone with a sufficient quantity of fortitude, intelligence, and moral malleability can make it to the top. This wasn't so when you had to be born into the right family or be friends with the right people.
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