> Then you die
> The bank takes your shares to pay your debt
> The IRS taxes this against your estate as income
> The entire value of your estate is taxed for any capital gains at the “fair market value” of all your assets at the time of your death
> and then that's it.
Maybe we should ban interest instead, just like how we were told thousands of years ago. See: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loans_and_interest_in_Judaism
…or “sabbath mode” on many appliances on the market.
The funny part to me is believing in an all-powerful and omnipotent god whom you can nonetheless fool with semantics and shuffling papers.
There's no fooling going on. There's just faith traditions that believe God, either generally or for specific subsets of the overall rule set, is extremely concerned with the letter of the rules and not what humans might infer the spirit to be from the letter. That is, the rules are the rules, not an imperfect approximation serving some higher but difficult to express set of rules.
We don't do that in Islam.
We also have explicit texts in Hadith that call out and reprimand attempts to bypass usury by buying an item in installments, then selling it back to the original seller for a lower cash price. The effective transaction being a money for money contract with a disposable item in the middle. All this is prohibited.
You will not find a single Muslim scholar say that it is ok for a woman to wear a wig instead of a headscarf, even though technically she is still covering her hair.
The reality is that when you have enough cash to justify, you roll your assets into a series of South Dakota trusts and that money is perpetually tax-free.
Another tactic is to use Nevada and Delaware corporations to buy real property everywhere, and use that to avoid most taxation.
The exotic trust structures talked about here are money laundering structures, which exist because gullible voters are duped with tales of widows losing houses and farm families losing the mythical family farm. There’s a reason why the home base for this is a state with weird banking laws where there’s more cattle than people.
Mitt Romney’s (I point him out because of his fame in this regard, he’s not unique or alone) great-great-grandchildren will be living off some untaxed trust 150 years from now when we’re all dead.
-- Mitt Romney
Not sure if worse than his descendants living tax free hundreds of years for now, is having his image whitewashed for his "bullwark against Trump" that weirdly only manifested in the latter part of his term.