Hacker News Reader

Comment by corpMaverick | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate a little bit ?

A lot of "family farms" in the US these days are essentially a tax dodge.

https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/112844547165831987...

Basically, there's a lot of tax breaks available if you designate your land a "farm", even if you don't grow anything. About 22% of farms in the US produce 0 output.

This is true and visible in the Bay Area. There are a number of large properties where the owners have a vineyard. The vineyard is really so some of their land can qualify for agricultural proprietary tax rate.

How do you know that's the reason and not that they legitimately wanted to have a vineyard? They don't tend to it and harvest from it? All the ones I've seen looked to be in use, but don't know for sure.

Many are in use, often with operations leased out. This produces some modicum of revenue to cover the farm designation. The real upside is the ownership and associated capital appreciation w/o as large an annual carry given reduced property taxes.

On the east coast you often see alpacas; their fur get harvested periodically.

Unfortunately these tricks are common in many states, especially in high tax states with wealthy residents trying to dodge taxes.

Hmm...I have this data, I'm going to double check. Need to ensure the linked twitter thread is referring to sales, and not profit. Easy to hid profits in farming (nothing dodgy about it either). No better, no worse than every other industry in America. They take advantage of the laws as they are written.

Yeah, I don't fault any individual for using tax breaks legitimately available to them. It's a failure of leadership for not closing loopholes.

He's giving away basically all of his money, and leaving comparatively little to his kids, $10 million I think. It's a ton of money, but a small enough amount that they could spend through it in a generation if they aren't careful. Apparently he finds the idea of passing on vast fortunes to be distasteful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com