Jeff Schnepper begins his article, 2010: The best year to die? (MSN Money 10/1/09), by relating a charming conversation with his children:
My kids had just sat me down and given me the bad news: I was going to die. They couldn't tell me what was going to do me in. But I was clearly a goner.
The upshot of this conversation is that he is now "scheduled for a nondeductible chariot ride into the sky."
Schnepper points us to a study that shows that people are more likely to die before a tax increase:
In fact, in the 2001 paper "Dying to Save Taxes" (.pdf file), economists Joel Slemrod of the University of Michigan and Wojciech Kopczuk of the University of British Columbia studied 13 changes in the U.S. tax code from 1917 forward. They concluded that taxpayers died in greater numbers just before tax increases and just after tax cuts.
A 2006 study in Australia reached the same conclusion. More than half of those who ordinarily died in the week before the abolishment of the Australian inheritance tax survived into the next month and escaped with their estates untaxed.
