Harvey Schein was once one of the Fortune 500 CEOs.
In the 1970s he moved between New York and Tokyo, leading the American arm sonythat brand revolutionized consumer technology and ushered in what became a new digital age.
Schein He doubled Sony’s sales In the US, he became the industry’s most prominent leader until 1978, when Sony founder Akio Morita ousted him for being too combative.
That part of Schein’s career has been documented in magazine profiles and business books. But a new film from his director son Justin Schein sheds light on his late father’s other battle, this one with the US tax code.
In Death and Taxesviewers will meet a retired Harvey Schein at home, obsessed with saving money and protecting his investment spoils from the IRS. The child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Schein grew up in a poor part of Brooklyn and inherited little when his parents died. He wanted his legacy to be grand. “It’s not that I’m selfish,” he says at one point in the documentary. “It is for you, for your descendants, for their descendants.”
Schein tried to ensure that his relatives would live comfortably after his death, but his fixation on frugality and tax avoidance caused him heartache during his lifetime. “My mother bore the brunt of his anger and harshness,” Justin Schein said luck. His father even insisted on moving his wife to Florida for tax purposes, overriding his deep objections.
Schein’s story is animated by footage of family gatherings and interviews recorded by his son in the two decades before Schein’s death in 2008. The family story becomes a means of investigating the moral questions that shape the current debate about the so-called “death tax”. ” and the mindset of the mega-rich who think high property taxes are un-American.
In recent decades, successive Republican presidents they raised the minimum threshold for the wealthy to pay estate taxes, a reduced tax rate, or both. Democratic leaders generally have it doing the oppositeseeing property taxes as a means to remove the concentration of wealth at the top of the socioeconomic ladder.
Today, The estate tax in the US is 40% and applies only to estates worth at least $13.6 million per individual. That’s more than double the $5.6 million individual exemption approved by former President Donald Trump before he took office in 2017. (The figure is adjusted for inflation each year).
Trump effectively cut property taxes for thousands of wealthy US families when his administration enacted the Tax Code and Jobs Act, a set of policies. set to expire early next year With Trump back in office and a Republican-controlled Congress, economists expect him to extend his tax code, though Republicans are unlikely to do so. repeal of the estate tax completely By comparison, during his failed presidential bid, Vice President Kamala Harris said she supported a tax plan. renewal that would drop the exemption to $3.5 million, thereby affecting thousands more people.
Justin Schein, the most popular Crip Campa Netflix An executive documentary produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, it sides with the left on tax issues. Over the years, he discussed the social impact of tax avoidance with his father, even though his father’s wealth allowed him to become a filmmaker, a point raised by his father in old footage and others interviewed on camera.
Courtesy of Shadowbox Film Inc
Documentarian Schein is carefully examining all approaches to the estate tax issue. He talks with Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, a libertarian advocacy group for taxpayers, Derrick Washington, professor of economics and urban policy at The New School, Amy Hanauer, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, and others . Through these conversations skillfully woven into his family’s personal narrative, the filmmaker debunks persistent myths about estate taxes (it is not double taxationfor example) and shows the role that tax benefits and loopholes have played in creating a the racial wealth gaphe still shared his father’s views on humanizing people.
“These issues are bigger than the politics of the moment,” Schein says luck. His father’s rags-to-riches story begins with an education paid for by the GI Bill, which is mostly. it benefited the white americans. “He’s a great representative of his point of view, and he lived it, and he deserves everything he won,” Schein says. But the question now, he continues, is whether having the ability to avoid taxes prevents others from experiencing the same economic progress.
The film is timely as lawmakers not only overhaul Trump’s tax code, but also because of changing American demographics. The US is entering a period of hope the largest transfer of wealth in the history of the country between generations.
That’s a cause for concern for University of California, Berkeley public policy professor Robert Reich, whom Schein interviews early in the film.
“If more and more wealth is accumulated and passed on to heirs without ever paying taxes, then we are on the way to a permanent aristocracy in America,” he says.
Death and Taxes is available online NYC Docs until December 1, and will be screened at film festivals. see movie site for more
