Naah. The problem is the ridiculous tax code.
NPR detailed it on a recent show: Listen above or read below.
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GUO: I got a pretty good one. Mine is a trick that lets billionaires get away with paying almost no income tax. It's called buy, borrow, die.
CHILDS: Oh, very metal.
GUO: It's very metal. And what I love about this way of dodging taxes is that it involves basic fundamental features of the tax system. There's nothing fancy about it.
CHILDS: It is the least fancy thing billionaires do maybe.
VISWANATHAN: This is an open secret. Not even a secret - it's just open.
GUO: Is this, like, Tax 101?
VISWANATHAN: Tax 101.
GUO: Manoj Viswanathan is a law professor at UC Hastings. He specializes in tax law. I called him up last week. He was actually having trouble finding a quiet room because he was in the middle of a wedding in India. Manoj says his students are often surprised when he tells them that Americans are pretty good about paying their taxes.
VISWANATHAN: We've got overcompliance. And people are more honest than they, as, like, a mathematical matter, need to be.
GUO: Wait, really?
VISWANATHAN: Yeah. Yeah. A rational person would - I don't want to give you advice on how you should cheat your taxes - would easily be able to lie on their tax return and get away with paying far fewer taxes.
GUO: And yet, Manoj says most Americans don't cheat on their taxes. And maybe one reason why, other than sheer patriotism, is that you can save a lot of money just by playing by the rules. That's what buy, borrow, die is all about. It takes advantage of how we tax income from buying and selling assets, stuff like real estate and stocks. And the rule is you only pay taxes after you sell something. Like, say you made a big profit on the stock market. You bought some stocks, and they went up. You don't have to pay taxes on those profits until you actually sell the stocks.
CHILDS: That sounds fair. You don't have the money until you do the selling.
GUO: Right. So you're stuck. You can't sell your stocks without getting hit with taxes. But you also want to spend your profits. So what do you do? Manoj says, well, there is a way to avoid paying taxes and to spend some of your new wealth. You can go to the bank.
VISWANATHAN: Go to the bank. You can say, listen, I'd like to borrow some money. They say, well, what do you got as collateral? We can't just give you money. It's like, well, I've got this portfolio of stocks that's worth a million dollars. I'm willing to put that up as collateral if you let me borrow $500,000.
GUO: So the bank gives you a $500,000 loan, and you say, well, if I don't pay it back, bank, then you can just take my stocks, which are worth a million dollars.
VISWANATHAN: That's right.
GUO: A couple of years ago, the investigative news outlet ProPublica got the tax returns of some of the richest people in America. And what they found was a lot of billionaires weren't paying very much in income tax. One likely reason why is this buy, borrow, die business. If I have a lot of valuable stocks, I can easily borrow money to fund my lavish lifestyle.
When do I pay taxes on it, then?
VISWANATHAN: You - maybe never.
GUO: What?
VISWANATHAN: You would pay tax maybe never.
GUO: You might never pay taxes because you could live on borrowed money for the rest of your life. If you have enough stocks, you can just get new loans or the bank will extend your old loans. And here comes the final piece of the strategy. When you die, all those taxes on your stock market profits get wiped away. It's called a step up in basis. Your basis is like what you originally paid for your stocks, and it's how you calculate your profits. That gets stepped up when you die. And so the people inheriting your stuff, they get a clean slate. They don't have to pay any federal income tax on all of your stock market profits.
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Perfectly legal but wrong by any definition of the word.