Another Twist of the Knife: Introducing a New Death Tax Read full article May 1, 2021, 10:29 AM·28 min read The devil is in the details, and while, when it comes to the Biden tax plan, Old Nick is not just lurking in the small print, one particular technical-sounding change proposed by the president is rightly attracting some attention: that is the plan to scrap the long-standing principle that if someone inherits an asset, his or her basis cost in that asset for capital-gains-tax purposes is not the price that the deceased may have paid for it (or its value when it came into the deceased’s ownership) but its market value at the time of the deceased’s death, a “break” that can be justified on grounds of basic fairness. That’s the case for various reasons, but one of the most obvious is that estate tax may well, in the case of the wealthiest, also be payable on what is left after the capital-gains tax has been paid.