Lying To Make Friends » property http://www.lyingtomakefriends.com Thu, 24 Feb 2011 16:24:02 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 The Rich Get Richer http://www.lyingtomakefriends.com/2010/06/the-rich-get-richer/ http://www.lyingtomakefriends.com/2010/06/the-rich-get-richer/#comments Tue, 15 Jun 2010 02:47:12 +0000 admin http://www.lyingtomakefriends.com/?p=786 sad polar bearAmerican property law is not meant to protect the little people. This is not a legal blog, so I’ll spare you the details, but just trust me on this one: property law protects the interests of rich people. Studying for the California Bar Exam this summer and having to study property law for the second (and hopefully last) time has brought this issue back to the fore for me. AR and I will be spending some significant amount of time over the next two months memorizing all the ways that rich people have come up with to ensure that they have control of their wealth even after their deaths. These are called “future interests,” but basically it just means “having to respect the whims of rich dead dudes.”

So you can imagine my irritation when I turned away from my property law studies to the New York Times, only to read more tales of rich dead dudes sticking it to the rest of us.

This year, billionaire Dan L. Duncan, soft-spoken hunter of polar bears, died, and it looks like his entire estate will pass to his heirs tax-free. Why, you ask? Why will we lose millions in tax revenue so that Duncan’s heirs can bask in even greater wealth? Like an old dead dude with future property interests, the whims of President Bush are coming back to haunt us. Back in 2001, Bush signed into law a one-year lapse in estate taxes to happen in 2010. (Apparently some of his cronies felt they had about another 9 years in them??) The NYT, being classy, notes this tax break has an element of the macabre:

Some estate lawyers worried that tax considerations might prompt their clients to keep an ill relative on life support through the end of 2009 to get the favorable treatment — or worse, resist life-prolonging measures to hasten a relative’s demise before the end of 2010.

I mean, really? Couple of million in taxes on an estate worth billions is worth making sure Gramps dies in 2010? Rich people are crazy.

Also, when is the ghost of Dubya going to stop haunting us already?

-AS

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