Tax Legislation, Anyone?

Last spring the Trump administration came up with a vague, one-page proposal for revising the Internal Revenue Code. After months of reportedly serious effort, a six-man task force has expanded  the proposal to a vague, nine-page plan.

But "it's not really a plan," as Catherine Rampell points out in The Washington Post:

At best it’s an outline, offering barely more detail than the bullet points the Trump administration released in April. It doesn’t even specify the thresholds for the individual income-tax rates it proposes. It also doesn’t identify a single individual tax preference it would kill, despite claiming to simplify the code and close lots of “loopholes.” Even the state and local tax deduction, which administration officials have talked about eliminating, isn’t explicitly mentioned.

While we wait for Congressional Republicans to come up with an actual tax bill, there's plenty to wonder and worry about. How can abuse of the proposed 25% tax rate on income "passed through" businesses such as partnerships  be prevented? What if repeal of the estate tax (which affects almost nobody) exposes millions of Americans to capital gains tax on inherited assets?

Wealth Management Clients Should Be Careful with Their Checks

Frank Abagnale Jr. ("Catch Me If You Can") in a WSJ interview:

Think about this: You go into a convenience store today and write a check for $9. You have to hand the clerk the check with your name and address, phone number, your bank’s name and address, your account number at your bank, the routing number into your account. That’s your wiring instructions. Your signature that’s on the signature card at your bank. And then the clerk has written down your state driver’s license number on the front and your date of birth. You don’t get the check back. You can get an image of the check; the physical check goes to [the store’s] warehouse, where eventually, six months from now, they will destroy it. 

In the meantime, anyone who would see the face of that check—from the clerk who took it at the counter to the one that made the night deposit—could draft on your bank account tomorrow, would have all the drafting instructions. Or they could go online [and order checks] that look exactly like your checks, but put their name on it and put your account number on it. So every check they write gets debited against your account. It’s so simple to do. 

It’s amazing to me that people are writing $9 checks from their wealth-management account, their private banking account, and giving them to some stranger in a store.

Ray Dalio's “Slightly Better” Returns

Now that real life has blended with reality TV, you can't blame the Main Stream Media for stressing out. Still, this lengthy NY Times piece on Ray Dalio, who runs Bridgewater, world's biggest hedge fund firm, seems a bit snarky. For instance:

Since it began, Pure Alpha has made investors an annual average return after fees of 11.9 percent, slightly better than the 9.5 percent average yearly return for the Standard & Poor’s 500.

Slightly better? Any stock picker who can beat the S&P by one percentage point over long periods is

Bridgewater's Westport, CT headquarters

exceptional. Two percentage points? Almost miraculous. With Pure Alpha Dalio has done better by 2.4 percentage points. Compare:

At the S&P's 9.5% average annual return, in ten years a $100,000 investment grows to 247,823.

At Pure Alpha's 11.9%, in ten years a $100,000 investment grows by an additional $60,000, to $307,823.

Over extended periods, that "slightly better" return will make you seriously richer.

Should We Tax Gifts the British Way?

Forsyth
(English Wikipedia)

Bruce Forsyth, the British TV icon who died last month, disliked the 40% U.K. inheritance tax. So he left everything to his wife tax free, thanks to the U.K. equivalent of our unlimited marital deduction. Wilnelia, his widow, will have the task of distributing some or most of Forsyth's £17-million estate to his numerous children and grandchildren.

And a quick glance at the U.K. inheritance tax rules suggests she can do it at little or no tax cost.

Instead of taxing gifts when made, the U.K. requires lifetime gifts to be added back into the estate taxable at the donor's death. Thanks to Forsyth's unused inheritance tax exemption and her own, Wilnelia can give or bequeath £650,000 without tax.

But she should be able to do better. Much better. The U.K. counts lifetime gifts as part of the donor's estate only if they are made within seven years of death. As a relatively young widow, Wilnelia presumably has time to parcel out millions of pounds tax free to Forsyth's descendants.

Even if Wilnelia should die within seven years of fulfilling Forsyth's estate plan, some tax might be saved. "Taper relief" reduces the tax rate on gifts made more than three years of death.

Should the U.S. adopt the British approach to taxing lifetime transfers of wealth? Or would it unduly favor those wealthy enough to give millions tax free?