Ben & Jerry - You Might Be an Inheritence 'Flight Risk' - Granite Grok

Ben & Jerry – You Might Be an Inheritence ‘Flight Risk’

Ben & Jerry are Half-Baked
Ben & Jerry are Half-Baked

Being on the MoveOn.org email list is the gift that keeps on giving.

Email Title: “Sign the petition: Tell Congress to keep the estate tax.”

It’s Ben and Jerry—the co-founders of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream—and we need your help.

We want to pay our fair share of taxes, but Republicans in Congress are trying to pass an unnecessary tax giveaway to America’s wealthiest citizens. We don’t want, need, or deserve this tax cut—which is why we’re asking you to sign our petition to Senate Democrats…

As we recently wrote in an op-ed in USA Today, we’re wealthy thanks to the good fortune of our efforts—but also because of many other societal factors that contributed to our wealth.1 The estate tax is one of the ways that the wealthy pay forward so the next generation has the opportunities we had.”

(Emphasis in the original)

Put simply, Ben & Jerry believe that the heirs of business owners, farmers, and others who have paid their fair share of taxes all their lives while growing a business, are too stupid or selfish to pay what was left after taxes forward (upon death) the way they would like.

As a stop-gap to this likely misuse of the government’s money,  they would like to ensure that bureaucrats and politicians–who know better–get their hands on that money.  This will ensure, well, if the past few decades are any indication, that it goes to political donors and connected special interests and crony capitalist friends and family members, who will more than likely waste it on a boondoggle or –accumulate it themselves and then hide it in a trust so it wont be subject to an inheritance tax.

Yes, to fully appreciate Ben & Jerry’s estate tax vision your heirs may have to sell the family business or the family farm to pay that estate tax.  But why would Ben or Jerry care about that?  While (to their credit) they were quite generous with their companies money while in charge, they sold their ice cream business to a foreign conglomerate in 2001 for $326 million dollars.

Your business, your “team,” your family, your employees or their families, are of no import to either Mr. Cohen or Mr. Greenfield.  So what if they suffer because you had to fire them to liquidate a business to pay the estate taxes they are defending.  Properly “paid forward” they will serve as temporary compensation while your former employees look for new jobs.

Unilever did eventually have to close plants and fire workers to make the company profitable.  But I’m sure both Ben and Jerry took them all in and are caring for them and theirs because the more government control there is the less likely any of them will ever have the “opportunities they had.”

So, who thinks that either Ben Cohen & Jerry Greenfield will happily give up 40% to 50% of their accumulate compensation including the $326 Million they made (plus interest, capital gains etc) when they sold the company to Unilever, to the federal government upon their deaths?

It could happen.  But I doubt it.

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