[dmoy]

> The real outrage is that this is legal

As stated it's not exactly accurate.

Your estate is taxed before it goes into a normal trust. To avoid taxes with a trust you have to set it up a long time in advance and slowly shift money in. And at $1B, it's not gonna happen. Even if you use various tricks to put lower priced assets into the trust early and let them appreciate (or e.g. buy permanent life insurance with the trust assets), none of those strategies scale to O($billion)

GSTs used to be able to get around that, but not so much anymore.

A "real" way to avoid it is to put massive amounts into a charity (or occasionally a "charity"), and then have that charity hire your kids for cushy jobs. There are other ways around it too, hiding assets overseas or whatever.

But the article gives a very inaccurate description of using trusts to get around estate taxes. Which is ... weird, right? It's an estate planning attorney? I dunno.

[yieldcrv]

yep, and the charity’s underlying entity can be a corporation or a trust, which does confuse the general understanding of these things as the terms are often conflated

almost infinite permutations are possible