Quite a few billionaires, including Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, have pledged to give away almost all of their fortunes to charity. The Waltons take a different approach. They have decided to hoard as much of their fortunes as possible. They have decided to use each and every tax loophole possible in order to keep their money in their own family, and not to allow the public to claim a single dollar more in taxes than they absolutely have to. In Bloomberg today, Zachary Mider has an excellent in-depth report today on the strategies the Walton family uses to avoid estate and inheritance taxes on their fortune, which has been built on the backs of extremely low-paid workers. One of their favorite techniques: establishing a type of charitable trust that can shelter money from taxes, and later put that money back into the pockets of family heirs. Sometimes, with a profit! If the trust’s investments outperform that benchmark rate, then the extra earnings pass to the designated heirs free of any estate tax... With a big enough spread between the actual performance and the IRS rate, a Jackie O. trust can theoretically save so much tax that it leaves a family richer than if it hadn’t given a dime to charity... “This time in history is probably going to go down as a unique opportunity” to “transfer assets out of an estate at the lowest cost,” said Charles J. McLucas, president of Charitable Trust Administrators Inc. in Tustin, California. So the next time you hear about how fabulous the Walton familys opulent new art museum is, or how much money the Walton family has given to land conservation, remember that all of that charity is part and parcel of a structure designed expressly to hoard billions of dollars within this one single family, and to avoid paying the normal tax rates that have been levied for the purpose of a tiny step towards equality. And also remember that all of the millions and millions of workers who made those billions and billions of dollars possible are trapped in a world of low wages, and are prevented from unionizing and bettering their own situation by the zealous efforts of Wal-Mart.
Posted on: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 17:39:39 +0000
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