Steve Lamar

So that's how a lot of these big tech billionaires do it.

They take a small salary, and then they just keep some asset that's ballooning in value, they don't let it go, and they keep borrowing money against it.

$10 million or $100 million or even $100 billion doesn't have to report it on their income tax returns.

That tax on inherited property, the estate tax,

But it doesn't actually work.

It has become functionally eliminated.

It's just there, a ghost of itself.

Payroll taxes have gone up and tariffs have gone way up.

And meanwhile, the shrinking ineffectual estate tax is over there pretending to level the playing field.

An amazingly effective campaign.

even though the vast majority of Americans would not be rich enough to be subject to the so-called death tax.

Like, the estate tax only applied to .07% of descendants.

There was this campaign to turn it into a scary thing that people would want to dismantle, and it was so successful.

Trump said he would fight the death tax, but when he had the opportunity to eliminate it, he didn't.

It wasn't in the big, beautiful bill.

Because the 36-year-long marketing campaign against the estate tax has rendered it pretty useless, and all the rich people are very happy to let the estate tax stay in its winnowed-down state so it's just a shell of itself.

Ray Madoff thinks this is kind of a lost cause.

It's not worth trying to fight to make the estate tax robust again.

Because it makes rich people look good.

It makes them look like they are paying their share.