Who died and left the US $7 billion?
Billionaires are like black holes. We deduce their existence from the fundamental laws of capitalism, see their gravity pull politics into their orbit, even detect signals of their existence in the public markets.
Determining exactly how rich anyone really is, though, can be a fool’s errand. The most profound revelation in Thomas Piketty’s era-defining “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” wasn’t that we were experiencing Gilded Age levels of inequality, but his argument that Forbes’ list of the ultrawealthy isn’t accurate — and we don’t really know the billionaires living among us, or the extent of their wealth.
Last year, observers with the economic equivalent of a radio telescope detected a radiating anomaly on the February 28, 2023, daily balance sheet of the US Treasury Department: a $7 billion estate- and gift-tax payment.
John Ricco, now an analyst at Yale University’s Budget Lab, first spotted the huge receipt while trying to answer a somewhat macabre question: how did senior-citizen deaths from Covid affect government revenues? (Quite a bit — high mortality and the frenzied pandemic stock market more than offset the Trump administration’s tax cuts.)
