A Quote by Gary Cohn

On the estate tax, if you look at the couple of groups who are the biggest advocates for repealing the estate tax, it really is the pass-through business, and it's the farmers.
Repealing the estate tax won't create jobs, it won't boost GDP, and it won't add efficiency to the market. Instead, repealing the estate tax will simply add to the debt, hurt our ability to build a stronger economy and worsen economic inequality.
I don't want to get into the 'who's a hostage-taker' discussion here, but what is the estate tax? It's a double tax on death. Economists will tell you that it's really not a tax that soaks the rich, but it's a tax on capital that deprives business investment and therefore job creation.
If you're a full-time manager of your own property - and full-time, according to Congress, is 15 hours a week - you can take unlimited depreciation and use it to offset your income from other areas and pay little in tax. One of the biggest real estate tax lawyers in New York said to me, if you're a major real estate family and you're paying income taxes, you should sue your tax lawyer for malpractice.
What people really haven't thought about with real estate is, if you get tax reform, you're going to see real estate now... the velocity of selling and buying real estate will just kick.
The real estate lobby has prominent allies in both parties. After the last major overhaul of the tax code, in 1986 - under a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, a Republican Senate and a Democratic House - it was a Democrat, Bill Clinton, who signed legislation that restored lost real estate tax breaks seven years later.
Me and my dad are the biggest promoters of an estate tax in the US. It's not a popular position.
If we completely repealed the estate tax, it would provide an estimated $32 billion tax break for the Walton family - the founders of Wal-Mart.
The estate tax punishes years of hard work and robs families of part of their heritage by imposing a huge penalty on inheritance after death - a tax on money that has already been taxed.
I really like the idea of consumption tax, and most countries have a pretty serious consumption tax. It's called a value-added tax or a goods and services tax ... It's a sales tax. It doesn't tax labor, it doesn't tax savings or investment - it taxes consumption.
People were holding high denomination notes to keep tax unaccounted for money. Some sectors like real estate were using cash to avoid tax.
In 2010 the U.S. will have a payroll tax rate increase, an estate tax increase, and income tax increases. There's also a tax increase coming in 2010 on carried interest. This rate will rise from its current level of 15 percent to 35 percent, and then it will rise again in 2011.
All those predictions about how much economic growth will be created by this, all of those new jobs, would be created by the things we wanted - the extension of unemployment insurance and middle class tax cuts. An estate tax for millionaires adds exactly zero jobs. A tax cut for billionaires - virtually none.
We must end the iniquitous multi-taxing of the same money. It is not right to tax people's incomes, then their savings on that income, to tax the movement of assets through capital gains tax, stamp duty and tax them again through inheritance tax if they have the audacity to die.
It is no secret that our tax code is drastically outdated and burdensome to all Americans. Fortunately, more and more people are aware daily of the inequities that arise from things such as the estate tax, and it has come to the forefront of Congress' agenda.
I thought I would spend the rest of my life being a good tax lawyer. The interesting thing about being a tax lawyer is, none of your clients are poor. I had clients come to me and say, 'Can you help us make investments?' That led to me getting into the real estate business.
When you can identify a specific tax that people don't like, and this is one that was designed for the Rockefellers, for the Carnegies in 1916, to fund World War I, but now it's beginning to hit small business people, real estate holders, a lot of people well down the income scale who just spent a life building assets. Suddenly they get hit with a 40%, 50% tax rate.
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