Why would the life insurance industry care about that? It turns out that ten percent of life insurance industry revenue is related to the estate tax. Wealthy people take out life insurance in order to reduce estate taxes because when you die, your life insurance payout doesn't count as part of your estate.
Did you know that Warren Buffett owns six life insurance companies? Did you know he supports the estate tax? You do now.
Warren Buffett isn't just noted as an owner of life insurance companies and a supporter of the estate tax. He's also noted as a buyer of family businesses. As Dick Patten shows, these two business strategies support each other.
A family business owner or farmer takes out a large life insurance policy which he sinks tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into each year. When he finally passes away, the life insurance pays out his policy to his family--tax free...
Even as Mr. Buffett's insurance companies are "protecting" family businesses from the IRS, he is buying companies that are forced to sell themselves to pay the death tax. Mr. Buffett's ability to buy family businesses at bargain basement prices depends on families being desperate to sell-and nothing produces family businesses desperate to sell quickly like a 55% bill from the IRS on all of the businesses' assets.
Estate taxes must be paid to the U.S. Treasury within a year of the testator's death. In cash.
Back in 1931, the liberal son of an immigrant banker knew what to call this kind of business. Matthew Josephson wrote The Robber Barons to argue that the industrial giants of the 19th century had not created wealth in the right way. They had acted like the feudal barons who for centuries had dominated the mountain passes through the Alps. The great corporations of the Gilded Age "monopolized strategic valley roads or mountain passes through which commerce flowed" just like the old barons-of-the-crags.
Hello, Warren? Isn't your business model exactly the one that so offended young Matthew back in the Great Depression after he got back from a decade living la vie bohème as an ex-pat in Paris? Aren't your businesses sitting at an economic choke-point, exploiting the unintended consequences of bad government economic policy, gouging successful family businesses both coming and going, and exploiting grieving widows?
Mark Levin