Marlene Engelhorn hadn’t given much thought to the wealth that surrounded her as she grew up. She always considered the fortune, inherited from Friedrich Engelhorn, the 19th-century founder of the German chemical giant BASF, to be her family’s money rather than hers.
Hey good thing (in the US at least), you don’t pay a dime of inheritance tax on the first $13.61 million being inherited.
So no “regular people” are paying any inheritance tax whatsoever. Americans have been fooled, again, into rallying against something that has zero direct effect on them.
I learned recently enough that this is because the Reagan administration came up with the (in fairness, an absolutely genius move given their political viewpoint) the great idea of calling it a “death tax”.
Thank you for that information. The article is about a German / Austrian woman so I was summarizing the pros and cons of an inheritance tax which might apply to any country since I don’t know the specifics of their law or why they changed it it.