Still, professional planners have sometimes held up the Waltons as a model. Patriarch Sam Walton, who founded Wal-Mart in Bentonville, cultivated an image as a regular guy from Oklahoma who enjoyed quail hunting and drove a beat-up Ford pick-up truck. He also showed unusual foresight about estate planning.
According to his autobiography, “Made in America,” Sam Walton started arranging his affairs to avoid a potential estate tax bill in 1953. His five-and-dime-store business was still in its infancy and his oldest child was 9.
That year, he gave a 20 percent stake in the family business to each of his children, keeping 20 percent for himself and his wife.
“The best way to reduce paying estate taxes is to give your assets away before they appreciate,” he wrote in the book.
Rockefeller Riches
Sam’s retailing success made his family the richest since the Rockefellers, who themselves were pioneers in estate-tax avoidance. As soon as the tax was enacted in 1916, John D. Rockefeller, then the world’s richest man, circumvented it by simply giving much of his fortune to his son. Congress closed that loophole eight years later by adding a parallel tax on living gifts to heirs.
Not all of Rockefeller’s Gilded Age contemporaries sought to found dynasties. Andrew Carnegie donated almost his entire fortune to charity, building thousands of libraries across the country. In this era, Warren Buffett and William Gates III have pledged publicly to give away all but a nominal amount to philanthropy.
“We shouldn’t have a situation where gimmicks allow rich people to avoid estate taxation,” Gates’s father, William Gates Sr., the author of a 2004 book that advocated for the estate tax, said in an interview. “A value in our lives is having children who make their own way to some extent. It’s unfortunate to have people who, when Mom and Dad pass on, they leave you a billion dollars for which you’d done nothing.”
Money Talks
At the end of the 1990s, an effort to repeal the estate tax gathered force, supported by a group of billionaire families and their lobbyists at Patton Boggs LLP, a Washington law firm. Walton Enterprises paid Patton Boggs to lobby on tax matters during that time.