One way the rich get richer is through inheritance, and they are barely paying taxes on it.
Americans are projected to inherit US$764 billion this year and would pay an average tax of just 2.1 percent on that income, New York University law professor Lily Batchelder estimated in a paper published yesterday by the Brookings Institution.
By contrast, the estimated tax on work and savings is 15.8 percent, more than seven times higher.
Many higher-income workers pay far more, with the top marginal rate now 37 percent plus payroll taxes.
“If anything, we should be taxing income from inheritances at higher rates than income from work,” Batchelder, a former adviser to former US president Barack Obama who has advised several Democratic presidential campaigns on tax policy, said in a phone interview.
To make the system fairer, Batchelder proposes scrapping the estate tax and replacing it with an “inheritance tax.”
The difference is more than semantic. The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimates her proposal could raise as much as US$1.4 trillion over the next decade.
Under the current system, wealthy Americans and their estates are required to pay 40 percent on bequests and gifts to heirs. However, they have many ways to avoid the tax.
For married couples, the first US$23.2 million of an estate is tax-exempt, and the rich can funnel far more to heirs tax-free using trusts and other complicated strategies.
Batchelder’s proposal would scrap this system, in which estates are taxed, and replace it with a system in which heirs pay income and payroll taxes on the money they receive.
It would try to make sure only the richest heirs would pay the new tax by exempting inheritances from tax until they reach a certain lifetime threshold.
If lifetime inheritances of less than US$2.5 million are exempt, the Tax Policy Center estimates the proposal would raise US$340 billion over the next decade from the top 0.02 percent of heirs.
A lifetime exemption of US$500,000, affecting the top 0.18 percent, would raise US$1.4 trillion.
The actual revenue from an inheritance tax could be much higher, Batchelder said, because the estimates do not include the effects of some parts of the proposal, including the closing of many tax-planning loopholes.
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