Meet the Aristocrats!
by digby
This is how wealthy people form aristocracies:
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, have used sophisticated estate- planning techniques for more than a decade to minimize taxes and amass at least $100 million for their family outside of their estate.
The couple created trusts as early as 1995, when Romney was building wealth as chief executive officer of Bain Capital LLC. They packed one for their children with investments that stood to appreciate and set up another for charity that provides a tax deduction and income. The candidate’s retirement account, valued at as much as $87.4 million, may benefit his heirs for decades.
“It’s beneficial for your kids and grandkids to push the money downstream,” said David Scott Sloan, chairman of the national private wealth services estate-planning practice at the law firm Holland & Knight LLP in Boston. “The Romneys appear to be doing things that are similar to what other high-net-worth families do.”
Wealthy couples use strategies allowed under the federal tax system such as moving assets to trusts so that the money may be subject to little or no gift and estate taxes, Sloan said. The Romney family trust is worth $100 million, according to the campaign. That money isn’t included in the couple’s personal fortune, which the campaign estimates at as much as $250 million.
Romney’s use of the tax code to minimize levies for his family has drawn scrutiny from Democrats portraying him as an elite person of wealth who is out of touch with many Americans.
Imagine that. Most Americans have to sell all their assets so they can qualify for Medicaid and get into a nursing home in their elder years. These fancy trusts aren't relevant to their lives. But for Mitt and the rest of the insanely wealthy .001%, preserving their wealth for the fruit of their loins is what it's all about.
I keep coming back to this:
From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.
The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are. Modern-day liberals often theorize that conservatives use "social issues" as a way to mask economic objectives, but this is almost backward: the true goal of conservatism is to establish an aristocracy, which is a social and psychological condition of inequality. Economic inequality and regressive taxation, while certainly welcomed by the aristocracy, are best understood as a means to their actual goal, which is simply to be aristocrats.
You can't have a better example of this than the Romneys.
.