[blackjack_]

Yes. And that wealthy individuals are avoiding taxes via things like buy -> borrow -> die, in which high stock valuations that increase but are not sold are not ever taxed, and roll over the taxation potential upon death to their current value. Thus by borrowing against them until death, the inheritor will inherit with a tax basis at the current value upon receipt and thus all taxes are avoided. In which case the tax would go from 0% to 20% (functionally a small amount may be sold to pay interest, so really assume 1% or 2% taxes default). The horror!

[HDThoreaun]

Buy borrow die as you describe still ends up with a 40% estate tax. Most uber wealthy want to avoid the estate tax so they utilize trusts, which cant die. Really the people who benefit the most from buy borrow die are those with 10-50 million. Not enough to pay serious estate tax because of the exemption. Above that everyone uses trusts which work differently. Not that the trusts dont have their own loopholes.

[verteu]

Indeed, the ultra-wealthy pay far less than 40% effective estate tax. Seems closer to 15% due to creative accounting, which is further reduced to 6.8% by charitable contributions:

> Specifically, for single decedents, estate taxes paid equal 6.8% of the value of Forbes wealth at death. The value of their gross estate is 39% of the Forbes estimate of their wealth. This large gap, already noted in earlier work (Raub et al., 2010), is likely to reflect the various techniques available to high-net-worth individuals to undervalue assets in the context of the estate tax. Taxable estate is then 45% of gross estate (due to deductions primarily gifts to charities) and on that base the tax rate is 39% (Balkir et al., 2025, Table 4 Panel B).

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34170/w341...