A bit back, we suggested the best option would be to eliminate the 2013, twenty-five (25%) personal income tax increase to 9.85% and get rid of our estate tax.  Then we put forth the thought to increase the estate tax exemption to not less than the federal estate tax exemption.  Now we wish to elaborate on the Minnesota Estate Tax.

In addition to raising the exemption to the federal level, here are a couple of provisions that ought to be enacted.

First, make a clear legal definition of a day of residency.  We propose this to be a complete one-day, 24-hour presence from 12 AM-midnight to 12 PM-midnight.  The day of arrival and the day of departure are not residency days.

Next, make the only test of residency be 183 days or more of 24-hour residency.  No other of some 32 reasons we have been using to claim as residency. None.  No games, please.

We want people to spend their money HERE, generate jobs for all and make charitable donations to Minnesota nonprofits.  We would like to encourage people to come here for sporting, cultural and educational events by exempting that or those days as residency days.  For example, if a person comes here for a professional or university football game, it does not count as a residency day.  The same for cultural events.  Ditto for education seminars, workshops, and the like where fees are paid and overnight stays may be required.  For instance, the university put on a five-day workshop on a given subject-scrapbooking.  The attendees had to stay over on those nights which brought more funds into our economy.  We want them to use our hotels, patronize our restaurants and spend money in stores and elsewhere.  This benefits all of us and brings in tax revenues.  It is a win-win for Minnesota.

There you have it.  Will the legislature consider these proposals?  We don’t know but we can hope that some miracles will occur.  We would like to end this segment with two examples of how this affects real people.  First, yours truly was confronted by a woman at a meeting saying she had to live in Arizona because of the Minnesota estate tax.   She was very unhappy. Next, we talked with another very nice woman who lived in a southern state and was having great difficulty in getting proper dental work.  Her lawyer would not let her come back to Minnesota to get her dental necessities done here.  Minnesota, as you may well be aware, is known nationally for its outstanding dental work.  So real people suffer because of our politics.  That sort of reminds us of a parallel situation in Minnesota history where we had a particular Indian Agent who said “Let them eat grass”.

Bob Smith III

December 2021