Ray Madoff

And one of the things that concerns me about this is that the wealthiest Americans don't typically do their giving directly to charities.

Instead, they give to their own donor-created private foundations and donor-advised funds.

And basically, they're ways for people to put money aside, get the tax benefits up front, but there's no payout requirement at all.

You can just park it.

And the financial institutions benefit when you don't spend it.

They have every incentive for you not to spend.

So we have these rules that are like pretending to do something that they're not.

What we need to do is we need to bring in inheritances and investment income into our income tax system just the way we do salaries.

It should be that when you inherit property or wealth or stocks,

You get taxed.

We could say that everyone can inherit even a million dollars tax-free.

But after that, they should pay income taxes on it, the way we pay income taxes on lottery winnings or anything else.

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