Truth-Out: For Trump's Rich Appointees, Death May Be Certain but Taxes Aren't

By Allan Sloan and Cezary Podkul:

Rather, we want to show you how combining this tax break with repeal of the estate tax -- a cherished Republican goal that could be achieved this year - can turn a temporary tax benefit into permanent tax avoidance, enriching the appointees and their heirs.

We're dealing with substantial money here: at a minimum, tens of millions of deferred capital gains taxes; at a maximum, hundreds of millions. We can't tell until we analyze filings that appointees haven't yet made with the Office of Government Ethics. One wild card is their holdings outside of the publicly traded companies with which some of them are associated, because we don't know what they would have to sell, how much of a gain they would have and how much in capital gains taxes they could defer. Rex Tillerson, for example, owns $28 million to $100 million in land and securities other than ExxonMobil, according to a Dec. 31 report he filed with the ethics office that listed more than 400 holdings.

Other very-well-off Trump appointees whose pending jobs will almost surely make them tax deferral candidates include Wilbur Ross, who made vast sums restructuring bankrupt steel companies; Gary Cohn, former No. 2 executive at Goldman Sachs; Steven Mnuchin, who made a huge profit buying a dead savings institution from the FDIC, reviving it and selling it to CIT, and also has extensive private holdings; Andy Puzder, chief executive of privately held CKE, a big restaurant chain; Linda McMahon, former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment; and Betsy DeVos, a scion of a rich family who married into the family of the co-founder of the Amway multilevel marketing firm, now known as Quixtar.

The Full Story (January 20, 2017)