Home      Kontakt         USA        Guestbook         Links

Keep estate tax, some of America's richest say

Anbei eine Pressemeldung von Reuters, die fuer sich selber spricht. Kommentare von mir werden bei Bedarf gerne nachgeliefert.

Wednesday February 14, 2001

By Steve James

NEW YORK, Feb 14 (Reuters) - In an apparent paradox in a country where money talks, some of the richest Americans are telling Congress to keep taking a big bite out of their families' inheritances so the poorest will benefit.

About 120 wealthy Americans have signed or supported a petition to oppose phasing out the estate tax, which is assessed on the net worth of someone at death. President Bush has included the repeal of the tax in his $1.6 trillion tax-cut proposal.

According to Wednesday's New York Times, opponents of Bush's proposal include the likes of billionaire financier George Soros; Warren Buffett, an investor listed as the world's fourth-richest person; philanthropist David Rockefeller Jr., a scion of one of America's most famous moneyed families and William Gates Sr., a Seattle lawyer and father of America's richest man, Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) Chairman Bill Gates.

They argue that repealing the tax will cost billions of dollars in lost revenues for federal and state governments and will result in either increased taxes or cuts to Medicare, Social Security, environmental protection and other programs.

Repealing the levy, which Bush calls a death tax and is paid in only about 2 percent of all deaths, ``would enrich the heirs of America's millionaires and billionaires, while hurting families who struggle to make ends meet,'' the petition says.

The petition will appear as an advertisement on an editorial page of The New York Times on Sunday and in other newspapers later, the Times said. The newspaper declined to give further details of the ad, or who placed it.

But in its front-page story, the elder Gates said the idea for the drive was his and he was working with a nonpartisan group called United for a Fair Economy. Gates, nor any of the other named petition supporters, were immediately available for comment Wednesday.

But Buffett was quoted in the Times as saying repealing the estate tax would be a ``terrible mistake'' and the equivalent of "choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the eldest sons of the gold-medal winners in the 2000 Olympics.

``We would regard that as absolute folly in terms of athletic competition. Without the estate tax, you in effect will have an aristocracy of wealth, which means you pass down the ability to command the resources of the nation based on heredity rather than merit.''

Gates Sr. was quoted as saying his son was ``sympathetic'' to the cause. Buffett, worth an estimated $28 billion last year, and Bill Gates, whose Microsoft stock is currently worth around $42 billion, have both said they will give away most of their fortunes in bequests at their death.

Currently, estates worth less than $675,000 are exempt from the tax, but over that amount, tax rates start at 37 percent and climb to 55 percent for estates worth more than $3 million.

In Washington, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan policy group, estimates that by 2010, when an estate tax repeal would be fully effective, the revenue loss would approach $9 billion.