The "steel curtain" won't stop estate taxes

Today's Wall Street Journal uses the plight of the owners of the Pittsburgh Steelers to editorialize against the estate tax. That the estate tax forces small businesses out of family ownership and into the arms of corporate buyers is well known, but the problem is more dramatically illustrated with a football franchise. What is the transfer tax value of the Steelers? Who knows, but it surely runs to the hundreds of millions of dollars. The value of football teams has grown enormously in the past decade or so, because they are not making more of them. How can that estate tax liability be funded? At a 45% tax rate, that is a serious amount of cash to raise.

The secondary factor mentioned by the Journal is the possibility that the capital gains tax could soon be shooting up. That gives the co-owners of the team a big incentive to sell the team to a deep pocketed outsider sooner rather than later.