Everything from Texas oil pipelines to Dixie cups to the Tea Party owes its existence in some way to David Koch.
Some back-of-the-envelope math would indicate that’s roughly $35 billion in tax revenue that could go toward any number of public services.
But thanks largely to a political climate David Koch and his brother Charles helped create, the federal government will never see anything close to that.
Thanks to a tax provision called step-up in basis, capital gains on inherited assets—stocks, properties, and more—are totally wiped out upon death.
Put simply, step-up in basis is a tax provision that allows unrealized capital gains to reset to zero upon inheritance.
“You can tax assets annually, tax them at death so you don’t get the tax-free step-up in basis, implement an actual inheritance tax,” Mazur told me.
The Trump tax plan, after flirting with eliminating the estate tax, raised the ceiling on tax-free estates to over $11 million per person. »
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