Tom Clancy’s Widow Prevails Over Kids From First Marriage In Estate Dispute
I often remark that you learn all the math you need for tax work by the fourth grade. The math issue in this case is one of the rare exceptions. If a share of an estate is exempt from estate taxes because it is going to benefit a surviving spouse, as in this case, or a charity and you use some of that share to pay the estate taxes, then that much does not qualify for the exemption.
So now you have a higher estate tax and if you pay some of that additional tax from the exempt share, you have an even higher tax and so on. A real accounting Einstein could solve the problem with algebra , but you can also grind it out by doing the computation over and over till it does not change. Thanks to Goal Seek in Excel, it is really not that hard, but still, I would want at least an eighth-grader handling it.
The Brokenness Of IRS Collections
A couple of observations here. There are numerous reasons why people are delinquent on tax payments. There are the people some of us call tax protesters who prefer to think of themselves as the ones who really understand the law, notwithstanding decades of losing in court. There are the war tax resisters, a fairly earnest, mostly harmless bunch. There are people who find themselves in severe hardship. But in my opinion, the largest group is people who would rather keep the money for themselves and think they can get away with it. Since the nineties, I think Congress has been overly solicitous of them which is really not fair to the majority who organize their lives to live on their after-tax income.
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Over and over again courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging one’s affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everybody does so, rich or poor; and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands: taxes are enforced exactions, not voluntary contributions. To demand more in the name of morals is mere cant.