Death and Taxes

Name: Death and Taxes
Availability: InStock
Author: Hans F. Sennholz

Hans F. Sennholz

Foreword

1. On Private Property and Personal Wealth

2. On Taxation and Inflation

3. History of Federal Estate Taxes

4. Death Taxes as Equalizers

5. Effects on Predecessors

6. Effects on Successors

7. Avoidance and Evasion

8. Inflation Transfers Wealth—Tax Free

9. On Trusts and Trust Funds

10. Alternatives and Reform Proposals

Conclusion

Index

Death and Taxes not only presents the economics of taxation, especially estate taxation, but also provides the reader with intelligent advice. When productive capital is forced to seek escape from death duties, there are pernicious effects even before the death occurs. Capital subject to future death duties tends to be reassigned from more productive uses to less productive ones, or perhaps is consumed entirely. Confiscatory estate taxation levied over half a century, according to the author, is imparting a new mentality that prefers conspicuous consumption to labor and thrift. The tax consumes productive capital and lowers labor productivity and wages. Instead of reducing economic inequality, death duties tend to increase the inequalities. This is why owners of productive wealth have a moral obligation to plan their estates to safeguard family wealth.

Paperback (pp. 105)