The Greatest Wealth Transfer in History Is Here, With Familiar (Rich) Winners
Mr. Pearl has two young adult sons with trust funds in the “seven figures.” He is also the chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, a nonprofit group of well-heeled Americans pushing for the wealthy to pay much more in taxes.
One reason they do not, he joked, is that “the basic way to save on taxes is to not have any income.” His tongue-in-cheek message being that it’s far better to earn capital gains on investments that go untaxed unless or until those gains are “realized” when sold for cash.
“I have right now in my stock portfolio, some stock that my wife’s father, who died a long time ago, bought in the 1970s — that investment has gone from a few thousand dollars to many hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Mr. Pearl noted. “I’ve never paid a penny of taxes on all that, and I may not ever, because I might not sell and then my kids are going to have millions of dollars in income that’s never taxed in any way, shape or form.”
Mr. Pearl noted that people with only a couple of million can use “securities-based loans,” borrowing low-cost funds from banks using the value of a given investment portfolio as collateral. “You just loan yourself money,” he explained, and in many if not most cases, the portfolio’s rate of return exceeds the rate of interest on the loan.
Mr. Pearl doesn’t think the U.S. government “needs more money from rich people” to fund itself. Rather, his support for reforming the tax system arises from his belief that the rich have begun to monopolize resources and opportunity in a way that jeopardizes social stability and economic growth.
Source: The New York Times
