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From Here To Eternity: The Folly Of Perpetual Trusts, Lawrence W. Waggoner
From Here To Eternity: The Folly Of Perpetual Trusts, Lawrence W. Waggoner
Law & Economics Working Papers
Trusts that can operate for as many as a thousand years or even forever, typically for the benefit of the settlor’s descendants living from time to time, now and in the future, are all the rage in banking and estate-planning circles. Before 1986, when Congress passed the federal generation-skipping transfer tax (GST tax), settlors had little incentive and probably little desire to establish perpetual trusts, even though they were permitted to do so under the law of Wisconsin, South Dakota, or Idaho. The GST tax created an artificial incentive for the wealthy to establish such trusts. The origin of the …
The Parallel March Of The Ginis: How Does Taxation Relate To Inequality And What Can Be Done About It?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
The Parallel March Of The Ginis: How Does Taxation Relate To Inequality And What Can Be Done About It?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Law & Economics Working Papers
The United States currently has one of the highest levels of inequality among industrialized economies. In addition, numerous scholars have shown that social mobility in the United States is significantly lower than it was in the period between 1945 and 1970, when inequality was also declining. The combination of these trends is dangerous because it risks transforming the US into a society where small elites capture most of the gains, a pattern in which growth cannot be sustained over time (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012, Zingales 2012). The level of inequality in the US after taxes and transfers are taken into …