A Good Week To Die
Wealthy Americans worth more than $3.5 million who aspire to maintain a comfortable afterlifestyle should plan to die in the first week of January 2010, when they will pay no inheritance tax. (Acquisitive heirs take note too.) Die a week earlier, in the final days of December 2009, and the government will get 45% of your estate.
Such considerations appear to have an impact on mortality. Two Australian economists who examined their country's death records from 1979, when the government killed its estate tax, have found that a statistically significant number of the rich delayed dying until after midnight on July 1 of that year. Presumably this was to avoid paying the 28% inheritance tax that ceased to exist after that date, though none of the dead millionaires were available to confirm this hypothesis.
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