Some weird tangent from the thread "Trump exempts entire white house senior staff from ethics rules"

Reagan wanted to scale it down to 50% and he got there. It's easy to manage a tax decrease. My grandmother died with 5,000 acres. Clinton raised it to 55% and went retroactive. Even a 5% increase is a huge amount of cash.

It's the increase in the rate as I explained. What do you suppose 5% of 5,000 acres would be in today's dollars. It would be the value of 250 acres. Who can afford to buy that with money in the bank?

I don't think she qualified as a small farmer. It was just farmland that wasn't being farmed. Besides, the small farmer estate was treated better after later legislation.

You should go by the 1995 decision I supplied in my previous post.

Can you imagine a liquidation of 5,000 acres in a rural community, and getting maybe 20% of the fair market value?

The direct heirs ended up with zero after the taxes were paid, and every bit of it is gone. How do you suppose they feel now? We got a Clinton-job. There are some nice subdivisions on some of it now.

 

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Reagan did a lot of favors for his corporate backers that the country is still paying for.

Ok, so small isn't exactly the adjective you wanted. It's about, what, ten - twelve times the size of the average farm at the time. And it was orchard country - not western dry ranchland. That is great wealth, ok?
And so Clinton raising the rates from 50 to 55 coupled with Reagan's establishment of retroactive assessment changed everything - completely altered the estate planning on eight square miles of farmland.

I agreed with that one too. It was a foregone conclusion with the '94 Court precedent, of course.

I don't see how raising the estate tax rates from 50 to 55 caused that.

Whereas apparently they would have ended up with 5%, split among them, if Reagan hadn't established retroactivity or Clinton had left the rates at 50.

And Hillary was threatening to do what, exactly - compared with Trump?

 

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Democrats raise taxes, and republicans lower them. That has been my experience as a tax-payer for 40-something years. Mondale's campaign slogan was to raise taxes when he ran against Reagan.
I also remember home mortgage rates peaking out around 24% under Jimmy Carter.

After the fire-sale on thousands of acres and the estate taxes there may have been a few hundred acres left for the heirs. I'm not allowed to see all the details.

I'm not privy to all the details. However the net effect is like having to buy 250 acres out of pocket. I think you would agree that 9 months is not enough time to have an orderly liquidation of 5,000 acres in land assets.

Hillary is on on the corporate payroll.

You are grossly misrepresenting the 1987 tax decision. The precedent goes back to the 1930s, per reference:

Indeed, since the 1930s, the high court repeatedly has upheld retroactive tax changes.

As I read the reference I also see that Congress caused the problem.

The 9-0 ruling upholds a 1987 move by Congress to apply tax changes retroactively to returns that were filed in 1986. It is a defeat for a Newport Beach estate tax lawyer who lost $630,000 in estate money when he sold stocks in 1986 to take advantage of a newly created tax deduction.

A year later, when Congress repealed the new deduction, the Internal Revenue Service demanded that the estate pay an extra $2.5 million in taxes. The case came to the high court as a test of how far the government could go in imposing tax changes retroactively."

"Tax legislation is not a promise, and a taxpayer has no vested right in the Internal Revenue Code," said Justice Harry A. Blackmun for the court. So long as Congress acts with "a legitimate legislative purpose" in mind, its tax laws, even retroactive ones, are constitutional, he said."

At the end of the day, none of your rationalizations change the fact that Clinton ripped off my family. I have a lawyer brother that has looked at it, and he voted Obama both times -- so you can't say political-party bias was part of his assessment. I think we are done.

 

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There are always winners and losers when it comes to taxes. You could say your family had previously been ripping off the country.

 

Sure. Like Reagan, and W - lowered taxes for their wealthy benefactors, put their military ventures on the the credit card - trillions in debt, from those two - and wrecked the economy.
Now we have an economy choked by inequality of wealth and income, and we have to get it to pay off those trillions of debt - much higher taxes than would have been necessary in order to avoid this mess.

Compared with whom?

And Reagan did raise them - had to, to avoid disaster. We're still crippled by that screwup's economic vandalism.

You blame Clinton? Not Reagan, not the Court, not Congress, not the Committees involved, not the estate planning that set you up to skin by on a 5% tax margin, not grandparents who violated Carnegie's Principle, none of the obvious - you blame Clinton, for oversight responsibility of an unnecessary and unintended (and still fairly vague as described) consequence of a mistake in a small, sound, and very much recommended change in the US tax codes.

How do you suppose you came to do that?
And how is it that something like Trump's reliance on cheating and bullying and stiffing people - on purpose - doesn't ring the same bell?