This story originally appeared in ProPublica.
It’s well known, at least among tax lawyers and accountants for the ultrawealthy: The estate tax can be easily avoided by exploiting a loophole unwittingly created by Congress three decades ago. By using special trusts, a rarefied group of Americans has taken advantage of this loophole, reducing government revenues and fueling inequality.
There is no way for the public to know who uses these special trusts aside from when they’ve been disclosed in lawsuits or securities filings. There’s also been no way to quantify just how much in estate tax has been lost to them, though, in 2013, the lawyer who pioneered the use of the most common one — known as the grantor retained annuity trust, or GRAT — estimated they may have cost the U.S. Treasury about $100 billion over the prior 13 years.
As Congress considers cracking down on GRATs and other trusts to help fund President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda, a new analysis by ProPublica based on a trove of tax information about thousands of the wealthiest Americans sheds light on just how widespread the use of special trusts to dodge the estate tax has become.
More than half of the nation’s 100 richest individuals have used GRATs and other trusts to avoid estate tax, the analysis shows. Among them: former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg; Leonard Lauder, the son of cosmetics magnate Estée Lauder; Stephen Schwarzman, a founder of the private equity firm Blackstone; Charles Koch and his late brother, David, the industrialists who have underwritten libertarian causes and funded lobbying efforts to roll back the estate tax; and Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs. (Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective is among ProPublica’s largest donors.)
More than a century ago amid soaring inequality and the rise of stratospherically wealthy families such as the Mellons and Rockefellers, Congress created the estate tax as a way to raise money and clip the fortunes of the rich at death. Lawmakers later added a gift tax as a means of stopping wealthy people from passing their fortunes on to their children and grandchildren before death. Nowadays, 99.9% of Americans never have to worry about these taxes. They only hit individuals passing more than $11.7 million, or couples giving more than $23.4 million, to their heirs. The federal government imposes a roughly 40% levy on amounts above those figures before that wealth is passed on to heirs.
For her part, Powell Jobs has decried as “dangerous for a society” the early 20th century fortunes of the Mellons, Rockefellers and others. “I’m not interested in legacy wealth buildings, and my children know that,” she told The New York Times last year. “Steve wasn’t interested in that. If I live long enough, it ends with me.”
Nonetheless, after the death of her husband in 2011, Powell Jobs used a series of GRATs to pass on around a half a billion dollars, estate-tax-free, to her children, friends and other family, according to the tax records and interviews with her longtime attorney. By using the GRATs, she avoided at least $200 million in estate and gift taxes.
Her attorney, Larry Sonsini, said Powell Jobs did this so that her children would have cash to pay estate taxes when she dies and they inherit “nostalgic and hard assets,” such as real estate, art and a yacht. (At 260 feet, Venus is among the larger pleasure ships in the world.) Without the $500 million or so passed through the trusts, he said, Powell Jobs’ heirs would have to sell stock that she intends to give to charity to pay her estate tax bill.
Sonsini said Powell Jobs, whose fortune is pegged at $21 billion by Forbes, has already given billions away to charity and paid $2.5 billion in state and federal taxes between 2012 and 2020. “When you look at an estate that may be worth multiple billions, and all the rest is going to charity, and you put it in perspective, what is the problem we’re worried about here?” Sonsini asked. “This is not about creating dynasty wealth for these kids.”
In a written statement, Powell Jobs said she supports “reforms that make the tax code more fair. Through my work at Emerson Collective and philanthropic commitments, I have dedicated my life and assets to the pursuit of a more just and equitable society.”
Others whose special trusts ProPublica identified, including Bloomberg and the Kochs, declined to comment on why they’d set up the trusts or their estate-tax implications. Representatives for Lauder didn’t respond to requests to accept questions on his behalf. Schwarzman’s spokesperson wrote that he is “one of the largest individual taxpayers in the country and fully complies with all tax rules.”
A typical GRAT entails putting assets, like stocks, in a trust that ultimately benefits a person’s heirs. The trust pays back an amount equal to what the trust’s creator put in plus a modest amount of interest. But any gains on the investments above that amount flow to the heirs free of gift or estate taxes. So if a person puts $100 million worth of stock in a GRAT and the stock rises in value to $130 million, their heirs would receive about $30 million tax-free.
In 1990, Congress accidentally created GRATs when it closed another estate tax loophole that was popular at the time. The IRS challenged the maneuver but lost in court.
“I don’t blame the taxpayers who are doing it,” said Daniel Hemel, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. “Congress has virtually invited them to do it. I blame Congress for creating the monster and then failing to stop the monster once it became clear how much of the tax base the GRAT monster would eat up.”
Users of the trusts extend well beyond the top of the Forbes rankings, ProPublica’s analysis of the confidential IRS files show. Erik Prince, founder of the military contractor Blackwater and himself heir to an auto parts fortune, used the shelter. Fashion designer Calvin Klein has used them, as have “Saturday Night Live” creator Lorne Michaels and media mogul Oprah Winfrey.
“We have paid all taxes due,” a spokesperson for Winfrey said. A representative of Klein did not accept questions from ProPublica or respond to messages. A spokesman for Michaels declined to comment.
Prince also did not answer questions. “Hey if you publish private information about me I’ll be sure to return the favor,” he wrote. “Go ahead and fuck off.”
The GRAT has become so ubiquitous in recent decades that high-end tax lawyers consider it a plain vanilla strategy. “This is an off-the-shelf solution,” said Michael Kosnitzky, co-leader of the private wealth practice at law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. “Almost every wealthy person should have one.”
ProPublica’s tally almost certainly undercounts the number of Forbes 100 members who use shelters to avoid estate taxes. ProPublica counted only those people whose tax records or public filings explicitly mention GRATs or other trusts commonly used to dodge gift and estate taxes. But a wealthy person can call their trusts whatever they want, leaving plenty of trusts outside of ProPublica’s count.
This month, the House and Senate are hammering out proposals to raise revenue to help pay for the Biden administration’s plans to expand the social safety net. The legislative blueprint released by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., would defang GRATs and other trusts, which would still be legal but no longer be as useful for estate tax avoidance. If the provision makes it into law, “it would put a major dent in GRATs,” said Bob Lord, an Arizona attorney who specializes in trusts and estates.
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has proposed going further in undercutting estate tax avoidance tools. But the prospect of any reform is uncertain, as Democrats on Capitol Hill struggle to find the votes to pass the package of spending and tax changes.
GRATs are commonly described by tax lawyers as a “heads I win, tails we tie” proposition. If the investment placed in the GRAT soars in value, that increase passes to an heir without being subject to future estate tax. If the investment doesn’t go up, the wealthy person can simply try again and again until they succeed, leading many users to have multiple GRATs going at a time.
For example, Herb Simon, founder of the country’s biggest shopping mall empire and owner of the Indiana Pacers, was one of the most prolific GRAT creators in records reviewed by ProPublica. Since 2000, he has hatched dozens of the trusts, often more than one a year. In an interview with The Indianapolis Star in 2017, the octogenarian Simon said, “It’s always a big tax problem” for the next generation when someone dies, “but we’ve worked that tax problem. We won’t have a problem with that.”
A spokesperson for Simon didn’t respond to questions for this article.
Mentions of these trusts have periodically surfaced in the press after being disclosed in securities filings, as was the case with trusts held by Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. In 2013, Bloomberg News published a groundbreaking series on GRATs, mining securities filings and other records to reveal how the mega-rich, including casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and such families as Walmart’s Waltons, had perfected the use of the device.
ProPublica’s data shows that Michael Bloomberg, the majority owner of the company that bears his name and No. 13 on Forbes’ list of the wealthiest Americans, is himself a heavy user of GRATs. Over the course of a dozen years, he repeatedly cycled pieces of his private company in and out of the trusts — often opening multiple GRATs in one year. During that time, hundreds of millions of dollars in income flowed through Bloomberg’s GRATs, giving him opportunities to shield parts of his fortune for his heirs.
ProPublica described the transactions (but not the name of the person engaging in them) to Lord, the trusts and estates attorney. The GRAT is “the perfect loophole to avoid estate and gift tax in this situation,” said Lord, who is also tax counsel for Americans for Tax Fairness and an advocate for estate tax reform.
When Bloomberg ran for president in 2020, he vowed to shore up the estate tax. “Owners of the biggest estates are expert at gaming the system to reduce what they owe,” a campaign fact sheet for his tax plan said. Bloomberg vowed to “lower the estate-tax threshold, so that more estates are taxed,” and to “shut down multiple estate-tax avoidance schemes.” His fact sheet offered few details as to how he would do that, and it didn’t mention GRATs.
The legislation Congress is now considering to curtail GRATs would leave open other options for estate tax avoidance, including a cousin to the GRAT known as a charitable lead annuity trust, or CLAT, which contributes to charity while passing gains from stocks and other assets on to heirs. And the legislation would grandfather in existing trusts, meaning that those who have already established trusts would be able to continue to use them to avoid paying estate taxes.
That has set off a predictable push by tax lawyers to get their clients to create tax-sheltering trusts before any new legislation takes effect.
Porter Wright, a law firm that offers estate planning services, told existing and potential clients it was “critical” to evaluate opportunities because “the window may close very soon. There are important and time sensitive issues which could substantially impact the amount of wealth you are able to transfer free of estate and gift tax to future generations.”
When foster kids turn 18, they have no financial support or parents in their lives. Poor kids grow up deprived of all the necessities of life, yet are often blamed for not being successful. We have just berm put through the wringer by a toxic trust fund baby who accomplished nothing good in his life but could still use his ill gotten wealth to falsely claim to be a business success as a means to become President.
Our system for maximizing the wealth of the “well born” is part of why our society is as sick as it is. Those super wealthy who have redesigned our country to put their needs first are indifferent and seriously out of touch with the life of average Americans.
Not sure Bezos or Jobs were well born
The government’s desire to take everyone’s money is pervasive. I am not a billionaire, but I made sure to save while I worked, and made wise investments of those savings. Probably deprived myself to insure a worry-free retirement.
I want to be judicious in how I redeem my retirement investments, but Congress has decided that I should not be able to hold on to it. There are required minimum distributions, and hefty tax liabilities for those required redemptions. The goal was to force one to exhaust the savings by death, with a graduated percentage required to be withdrawn (and taxed).
To me it is all the same: you work for your money, you invest it, but our government decides it wants it. I don’t begrudge those with GRAT’s. I have something similar to insure one of my daughter’s, who had mental illness and a developmental delay, will have sufficient resources after I die.
Those who want to take money from individuals forget that the money is invested in our economy and sustains economic growth. It is being used productively rather than for a dubious government program.
Not sure I want the government to take money, but to collect the appropriate amount of tax (more then zero). As the article stated, Job’s kids got a half a billion dollars tax free not so they would as you put it, invest in the economy, but so they would not have to sell one of the largest yachts in the world – there’s a difference, lets see if you can spot it.
That’s just resentment speaking. You feel you are “owed” respect for “depriving yourself” (though no one asked, nor forced you to), and instead of paying the toll for the ability to make that decision (you live in a stable, safe, and economically vibrant society, enabling you the option of creating wealth, rather than just struggling for daily survival), you seek to entrench those gains within your family unit, rather than returning them to the society that enabled their creation, allowing others to have the same opportunity. No one begrudges you the desire to care for your daughter, indeed, mechanisms for exactly that would be a perfectly acceptable policy choice, but to declare the “government’s desire for YOUR money is pervasive” is just silly avarice. Without the society that government ensures, you would have nothing.
You use the word resentment, I believe a mirror might help
To the extent you are talking about your own situation (as a presumably Regular Joe), did you miss the part about the estate tax hitting only the top .1% of citizens? And this before the abuse of the GRAT nonsense…
And if you are not talking about yourself, why the heroic defense of the top .1%? Why protect them from paying some amount of their estate to the government, as opposed to creating a landed gentry? When will their cries for justice be heard? If only they had some political power!
In olden times, the serf did dutifully praise his feudal lord and master, and understood that his lot in life was the natural order of things….
Estate and inheritance taxes are a Marxist concept. The third plank of the Manifesto suggests that “to create a truly just society, abolishing the passing down of family wealth to succeeding generations is necessary.” At least today’s democrats are honest enough to admit their rationale and the source of the idea.
Yes, unless one prefers feudal hereditary aristocracy, there really isn’t any other option. Certainly not for “meritocracy” spouting conservatives.
“today’s Democrats…”
Did you miss that part of the article which explained that the estate tax was created well over a hundred years ago to address the abusive power of the Robber Barons (and their families) in the (first) Gilded Age?
Apparently America was the first nation on earth to be controlled by “Marxists”! Now this is quite an historical discovery….
It is not the Government’s money, it is not politicians money, it is not the State’s money, it is your own money… Do as you please. Once you pay taxes on what you make, the Government (and other jealous people) need to butt out of your business. Do I find funding a yacht a bit over the top, yep, but none of my business.
As an added bonus we now have “new math” that magically claims 3.5 TRILLION does not require any money to fund, it pays for itself. Why would the Government need a mere 100 billion in inheritance taxes when 3.5 TRILLION is free?
Society creates ones wealth, period. In the abscence of civilized society every individual would exist in a state of bare subsistence, warring with their neighbors over resources. Should any one individual amass enough resources in such a scenario, feudalism is the result. It’s the only natural conclusion of the economic theory espoused by modern conservatism, and as such, must be inferred as it’s ultimate goal.
Matt, society is made up of individuals, society absolutely does nothing to increase wealth, the individual does. What job does society have? What business did society create? What building did society erect.? It is individuals working and prospering that make up society, not the other way around.
No Joe, without society, a collection of individuals is anarchy. Things usually end poorly for both nations and individuals who find themselves in such circumstances.
You stand on the shoulders of civilization, and believe you’ve grown taller.
Actually, Joe, it’s NOT your money. If it were, you could take it with you when you die. Be sure to come back and let us know how that turns out. It’s no surprise that the affluent, who have an undue influence on national policy, see to it that the economic rules of the society benefit them, sometimes (though not always) at the expense of the less-affluent.
Andrew Carnegie – no flaming liberal, he – posited that a wealthy person was the “custodian” of a portion of the society’s wealth (society-at-large being the only real “owner” of that wealth) while alive. His view was that, at death, an individual’s wealth should return to the society that enabled him/her to amass it. I’ve not seen anything in print suggesting that Carnegie viewed the notion of an income tax positively, but he wrote and spoke favorably about hefty estate taxes. Anyone from the U.K. in those days might well have had first-hand experience with the multiple downsides of a feudal, landed aristocracy. They were only a generation or two removed from bloody civil wars over whose interests, in fact, the government should serve.
Ray, not sure you understand if you have money, you already paid taxes on, you can leave it to anything you want. Some folks leave it for their children, some their church, some a dog pound. It is your money, you decide where it goes once you die, not the Government.
You’re sidestepping the issue, Joe. To repeat, you can’t take it with you.
It’s not far off-target to say you’re “renting” your income, just as I’m “renting” mine, and since the income comes to us via the society in which we live, there’s really no ethical problem with the society staking a claim to some – or even all – of it when we die. Estate taxes, written so as to not affect the estates of more than 99% of Americans, will inconvenience precious few MinnPost readers, and it’s always sad to see people defend the wealthy and privileged, who hardly need defending.
Those who believe society benefits from an aristocracy of inherited wealth are either delusional or members of that aristocracy. That doesn’t mean, nor do I mean to imply, that inherited wealth is always spent on the frivolous – sometimes it can (and has been) used for quite worthy causes. That said, there’s nogreat benefit to society overall from great wealth being in the hands of a single individual, or a single family. Such a situation merely proves that self-interest overpowers many a worthy instinct. It also ignores the incompatibility between a society founded upon – even if not lived up to – egalitarian ideals.
Ray, you are saying that Government has more of a right to a persons money than his children, favorite charity or his church ? That is very interesting. My belief is the person can give his money to whoever or whatever he wants. Government has absolutely no right to anybody’s money at death.
Joe, that’s not entirely true. In order to encourage retirement savings tax policy allows you to defer tax on any income placed in a qualified vehicle (IRA,401k,etc. ). That’s where Steve Scholl (above) is wrong. The IRS required distribution is on Untaxed income, and any growth.
Good point about the $100 billion being chump change, over 13 years. Congress created the “problem”, let then fix it. Which will never happen as we seem to have a lot of very rich people in Congress who won’t want their ox to be gored. Craig and Phillips come to mind just here in Minnesota.
As Congress considers cracking down on GRAT’s? Lets not forget it was the United States Congress who created this and all of the other legal loopholes that they are now using to polarize the citizens (and non citizens) of this country regarding income inequality.
In some of these cases, they were well-intentioned and the rules simply need updating. For example: Roth IRA’s were created to give ordinary people another tool to provide for their retirement and security. now, it’s being badly manipulated and abused by the ultra-wealthy to shelter money in ways the original law never conceived. These things should be re-examined and adjusted every few years to reflect the realities that exist…but the modern GOP is a post-policy party that has no interest in legislating or governing, only in assigning blame and amassing power.
It’s always interesting and sometimes a little comical when you come across adults who have somehow managed to get into conversations about responsible governance and taxation with absolutely no coherent concept of economics, government, or taxation.
In liberal democracies the government doesn’t just “take” money when it “wants” it… this is claim so completely ridiculous it’s not even worth responding to.
I will point out however that the neither concept of taxes much less the idea of estate taxes are Marxist in origin. Anyone who makes such a claim is simply daft. But you see these kinds of claims emerging from Libertarian/Conservative gallery all the time, it’s kind of funny unless these guys actually get into power of some kind. These specious claims about socialism, communism, and Marxism are always ridiculous.
The weird feature of these champions of the wealthy is their inability to think in terms of their own interests. This is specially weird when Libertarians fail so spectacularly because THEIR supposed to be the selfish ones in the room. No matter how many time they get screwed over by bubbles, recessions, bail-outs, etc. etc. etc. for the wealthy at their own expense… they keep coming back with this gibberish about wealth. Whatever.
It’s because at their core they truly ARE Feudalists in the classic sense. They believe there is a defined “order” to society that is naturally defined by wealth. Their delusion of course, is in reference to their own place in such an order. It’s why they cannot comprehend that contrary to their constant refrain that “Libertarianism has never been given a chance to work!”, it has in fact, and succeeded to the tune of several millennia of continued power and dominance. Of course one must consider several millennia of divine-right monarchy and oppressive feudal repression of all by a bare sliver of the population to be measures of success, but in terms of longevity it cannot be denied that it’s been the default position for human society, for the better part of recorded history.
Very insightful point.
Humans have lived in unregulated economies (and weakly regulated societies) throughout most of that failed species’ recorded history. To the detriment of around 99.9% of its individual members. Probably about the precise percent as never pay a dime of our Estate and Gift taxes!
Why not just gratefully throw one’s only moth-eaten cloak in the mud so the noble and God-chosen Baron doesn’t get his golden-threaded shoes wet?
I swear folks think that one day the combined populations, of whatever feudal kingdom you’d like, just woke up and said “Hey, you know what, Bob over there seems like a great guy, he should be the king”. They understand that they are supposed to think kings are bad, because of the dramatic reading of the Revolution they’ve been spoon fed since infancy, but are never able to connect the dots as to WHERE those kings come from, and what the ideology they ravenously support actually MEANS in relation to the real world. I know, I know, I expect too much from folks, but I mean, I think I was about 14 when I put it together, it CAN’T be that hard.
The Manifesto calls for the abolition of inheritance.
So there us that.
It was also written at a time when hereditary monarchs still held vast power in Europe and abroad. Hmm, I wonder what ol’ Karl might have been on about?
Also helpful to note, neither of the most notable Communist “revolutions” (or really any of the later third world ones) took place in egalitarian, capitalistic societies. The original was in a throwback feudal fiefdom, the other in a, for all intents and purposes medieval, economy, governed by a despot. Perhaps those inclined to turn our society into such might ponder such realities, if they fear communism so much as they claim.
Well, Mr Tester likes to throw “Marxist” around quite freely, as though use of that word ends the discussion. For him, and most “conservatives”, it does. But let’s think about it.
First of all, Karl Marx (and Sigmund Freud) were probably the two public intellectuals most influential in the 20th Century. Indeed, we’ve not had anyone that achieved greater cultural stature in the past 150 years. Much of their work and theorizing has (rightly) been discredited, but much of value also remains. Marx’s criticisms of the many failings and abuses of capitalism and labor “markets” are still quite astute and accurate, IMO. So just because “Marx said it!” doesn’t immediately mean it’s wrong, contrary to Mr Tester’s view.
Second, I have my doubts that Marx “originated” the idea that the transfer of vast wealth to succeeding generations should be abolished. It’s an idea that’s been around for some time, as the abuses of inherited nobility was not exactly a new concept for Marx in the 1870s. Again, just because Marx advocates for something doesn’t mean it’s an evil idea or even that the idea is “Marxist”.
Finally, the American Estate tax is hardly the “abolishing” of inheritance. Only the very richest .1% are even eligible to pay it, and even they retain most of their inheritance. As I said, our estate tax has been around since 1900 and exists in most advanced democracies. Is that also a sign of the (continuing) pernicious influence of Marx?
They say the difference between democrats and Marxists is that Marxists have actually bothered to read the Manifesto.
I like the use of “they.” Who is “they?” It turns out that “they” don’t exist. You and others (including a certain former WH occupant) act as if naming a fake group of people “they” or “some people” makes them real. For the least astute, it just might. But the group who regularly reads articles here, and certainly the commenters here are at least moderately astute. We know you’re just quoting yourself. I mean, you even literally quoted yourself in a comment a few days ago. I admit, I literally laughed out loud. And I appreciated, for the first time, that you might just be here to entertain the rest of us.
Yes, yes, it’s the libertarians, the guys who just want to be left alone, who are the silly ones. Why don’t they just go long with the collective, hand over their earnings like good serfs and let government rule them like they rule the rest of you peasants? The collectivists are nothing more than risk-averse and envious sheep who want someone, anyone, to take care of them from cradle to grave. We’d prefer to be free men.
The libertarians are the biggest freeloaders out there. They don’t just blame the metro, but also refuse to acknowledge how dependent they are on the government.
Thomas Hobbes has a very famous quote that seems generally applicable to today’s “Libertarians”. It ends with the phrase, “nasty, brutish and short”. How has a well-read philosopher such as yourself gotten around his concern? Or is Hobbes just excluded from the canon?
What’s comical about many of today’s “conservatives” is that they have no understanding that their personalities would have compelled them to be devoted monarchists had they lived in Revolutionary America, not “sons of liberty”. But I guess the word “collectivist” explains all….
I am always amazed that people get upset about the rich paying estate taxes. The exemption is now $11.7 million. Twice that for married couples. Most people won’t get anywhere near that. But it gets people mad.
Why aren’t you mad about kids going hungry? About people not being able to afford medical care? Its not money you earned. Its money you were given because you were lucky enough to be born into a rich family.
Do you mean the money that taxes have already been paid on?
Actually, one of the main ideas of the estate tax is to tax wealth that had/has not been previously taxed, such as long term capital gains which had not yet been “realized” at the death of the capitalist. So, much of this extreme plutocrat wealth has indeed never been taxed at all. And when progressives advocate to change the “stepped-up basis” rule to catch those gains when it’s clear the plutocrats are effectively evading the estate tax, well, that’s illegitimate, too!
The small holders never rest in defense of the plutocrats, it seems!
Inheritance taxes in the US and Britain date from the last decade of the 19th century, but taxes on inheritance are a much older idea than that.
Emperor Augustus levied a 5% tax on inheritance in about the year 4 AD.
From 1797 to 1808 the US levied a stamp tax on wills, which is a kind of estate tax.
Limits on inheritances go back at least as far as the code of Hamurabi (these earliest regulations limited who received them, not how much was received).
These ideas are also (like the graduated income tax) NOT attributable to Marx.
Just because Marx didn’t invent them doesn’t mean they aren’t part of the Marxist ideology.
Marx and Lenin would reject the Agustinian 5% inheritance tax, or a 60% tax with a $12 million exemption like we are discussing. They would recognize it for the ruse it is.
Let the offspring of those who exploited labor to keep 95%? Never.
Either you or J Smith asserted taxing labor is immoral in the income tax discussion. Marx agrees with you. Remuneration for labor is the only justifiable source of wealth accumulation to Marxists.
The recipient of the wealth transferred by inheritance did not labor for it and did not earn it. That is why the first Soviet congress did not tax inheritances. It abolished them. That is not at all similar to what we are discussing.
Marx is one of the greatest economic analysts and theorists of any age, even if his use value of labor theory was terribly incorrect and the mistake is fatal to his grand theory. All of his influences are classical or enlightenment political philosophers and theorists.
These include, centerally, the fathers of property rights and of capitalism.
Marx was opposed to Leninism. He wanted the world not to lose the benefits Locke and Smith bestowed with their understandings of complex systems – to Marx, socialism is an inevitable (and not necessarily beneficial) outcome of the stratification of wealth, which in turn is an inevitable consequence of unregulated wealth accumulation.
Stopping the generational transfer of that wealth seemed to Marx like a good way to put a brake into that process. Lenin is the authoritarian who wants to use the state to expedite what Marx thought was inevitable.
The manifesto is a PR stunt. Das Capital is worth reading.
What we have here is a perfect example illustrating why Republicans/Conservatives/Libertarians simply cannot be trusted to either provide valid observations nor reliable information, much less reasonable policy advice.
Tester and Smith enter the fray with patently false claims i.e. Democrats are Marxists, and estate taxes were Marx’s idea. When the false nature of those statements is revealed, instead of withdrawing them and attempting to join the rest of us in the real world, they double down on false and try wiggle out of their ignorance with different but equally facile claims.
The difference between Democrats and Marxists is that Democrats are Democrats and Marxists are Marxists. Anyone who claims they are one in the same doesn’t have a coherent concept of either. Look: you can claim that some level a agreement regarding some policies makes Democrats the equivalent of Marxists if you want… but then we get to say that Republican’s are Fascists based on equivalent observations between those two groups eh? Differences are REAL, the fact that diamonds and agates are both rocks doesn’t make the the same rock.
Meanwhile as someone who HAS read Marx extensively, I can tell you that if you really want to understand Marxist economics you need read his: “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts”; The Manifesto wasn’t meant to be a deep dive into Marxist economics, it’s a call to action, it’s called a “Manifesto” for a reason. And by the way, simply reading or studying Marx doesn’t make anyone a “Marxist” any more than being a Democrat makes anyone a Marxists.
Exploit? Change the laws.