Gift Tax Civil War

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II) Introduction
The first federal gift tax was introduced in The Revenue Act of 1862, and used to meet the revenue demands of the Civil War. Until 1916 it was seldom used by the federal government except during wartime and in certain circumstances to boost the economy. The gift tax went largely unchanged, instead the federal government focused mainly on estate and inheritance taxes until The Revenue Act of 1924. At that time the rate schedule mirrored the gift tax and had a lifetime exclusion of $50,000 and an annual exclusion of $500 per donee. As we will see the gift tax has had multiple statutory changes throughout the years. For the most part this tax has had no real arguments against its constitutionality. The biggest …show more content…

The tax applies whether the donor intends the transfer to be a gift or not.”The gift tax applies to a gift of money or property, and even the use of or income from property. Should you make any transfer where full consideration is not received in return then it is a gift, there are however certain things that are excluded from the gift tax. First, as mentioned earlier the annual exclusion, tuition and medical bills paid for someone else, gifts to your spouse, and gifts to political …show more content…

Morgens died on August 25, 2002, but made transfers in 2000 and 2001 into a trust. Her estate tax return was timely filed (on extension) on November 24, 2003. Under the “gross-up rule,” a decedent's gross estate includes all gift taxes paid by the decedent within three years of her death. Conversely, the return filed by the Estate did not include, as part of the gross estate, the gift taxes shown as paid on Mrs. Morgens' 2000 and 2001 gift tax returns. The Commissioner determined a deficiency based on the failure to include the gift tax in the gross estate, and issued a notice of deficiency accordingly. The Estate petitioned the Tax Court for a redetermination.
The Eighth Circuit noted the purpose of §2035(b)—to prevent deathbed transfers from decreasing the taxable estate —and stated that because “[t]he assets which were used to pay the gift tax would have been part of the gross estate if the gift had never been made ... the entire amount of the gift tax [is] properly included [in the estate] under § 2035(b).” Thus, that court concluded that gift tax paid by a donee under a net gift arrangement—where the donee was obligated to pay the gift tax—was nonetheless paid by the decedent for the purposes of § 2035(b)'s gross-up

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