A Q&A on Death and Taxes with Director Justin Schein

“Only morons pay the estate tax,” Trump’s economic advisor Gary Cohn infamously declared to Senate Democrats in 2017. Many of the wealthiest Americans live by this credo, and extend its meaning to all kinds of taxes — income, gift, you name them. The chances are that the wealthier a person, the lower the proportion of their wealth they pay back to the government in their annual filings.

Not only have these deep pockets avoided properly paying their fair share: They’ve organized opposition to them, burnishing phrases like “Death Tax” (to get the general public to oppose an estate tax policy that affects only a few thousand people a year) and popularizing allegations that progressive taxation is “un-American.”

These campaigns have helped create, over the last few decades, a powerful prevailing notion that the individually prosperous are unfairly penalized by excessive taxes, and that their wealth is theirs. Besides, what good could the general public do with tax dollars, anyways?!

Director Justin Schein challenges the most pernicious anti-taxation myths in his new film, Death and Taxes. Schein tells the story of his father Harvey’s ascendance into our top tax bracket and his mounting obsession with minimizing its burden on his estate — which tracks parallel to the story of rising American inequality in the late 20th century.

What results is a remarkable portrait of how defending wealth can shortchange both personal happiness and the collective prosperity of our society. 

Schein thoughtfully illustrates how our more redistributive mid-century tax system helped people like his father achieve their success — before trickle-down economics shuttered windows of opportunity for millions like him without access to the benefits of a robust tax base (or generational wealth). 

I got to chat with Schein before and after Death and Taxes’ packed Sunday night premiere at the DOC NYC festival. Schein tells me that Inequality.org was a go-to source during his research process, and our very own Chuck Collins is featured in the film, highlighting how dynastically wealthy families have effectively lobbied to stay rich and get richer.

Make sure you catch Death and Taxes when it reaches theaters or streamers near you.

Inequality.org: What brought you to your work as a filmmaker? And why do you think film was the right medium for this story?

Justin Schein: I’ve been making films for over 30 years now, and I’ve been grappling with my privilege since I was a teenager. Other wealthy people are reticent and very protective — so when I couldn’t get others to talk about it, I turned the camera on myself and my family.

Making a film about taxes is daunting: Who wants to sit through that?! But any subject can be a good film if you have good characters and good access. It’s more about showing the nuances and impact of social issues and policy on people: The documentary tradition has long been about elevating the stories of people in need.

Examining my dad’s life and our father-son relationship as a parallel to the trajectory of 20th century America — from the Depression to prosperity through this kneejerk desire to hoard and hold onto his wealth — hopefully helps transcend the technicalities of tax policy to make the story more universal. 

Inequality.org: When did you recognize the synergy between your family’s story and the broader history of U.S. inequality and tax policy? How did you figure out how to balance the two?

JS: Filmmaking is collaborative and I relied a lot on my two great editors, Purcell Carson and Brian Redondo, and my co-director, an old friend and great storyteller Robert Edwards. When you’re telling a story that’s so personal, you can lose perspective, so I needed theirs. 

I started this film in 1998. My parents were struggling when my dad pressured my mom to move to Florida for half the year after he retired, largely for tax purposes. She’s a city girl and a dancer, and totally lost her patience. He was pushing back, and there was an interesting story there, of a retired businessman imposing a tax-motivated move on his family.

My mom decided not to go back to Florida with him. And at the time, the estate tax was becoming a national issue. Republicans were campaigning on it being “un-American.”

I filmed their separation. Films need drama, but my family needed reconciliation, so I put the work aside and helped them get back together. It wasn’t until Trump ran for president in 2016 that I realized if he won there was a new real possibility that the estate tax would get repealed altogether and I had footage that could serve as a foundation for a broader look at this issue.

Interluding the personal and political is tough. My dad is a great character and powerful personality and it’s hard to balance that with politics. He passed away in 2008 and it was important for me to represent him in his complexity, both his compulsion to reduce his taxes and to provide for his family. 

Inequality.org: Your dad is aware of his own Faustian relationship to capitalism: When he’s 60, he writes a letter to you saying that he sacrificed his happiness, in some ways, for success. Why do you think this happened?

JS: I always found it humorous how my dad was wealthy and cheap. There’s an absurdity to it, but I can’t make a judgment about it. My dad grew up through the Depression with parents and grandparents who came to the U.S. for a better life. He slept in the same bed as his brother.

He was scrappy and motivated, and those things that made him a success also made him at times unhappy. It’s generational, to a degree, about the immigrant experience. But it’s woven into this idea of the American dream, that he saw himself personifying: rising up, succeeding. 

That’s a wonderful thing, but the reality behind it is that the achievement is facilitated by a society, which my dad benefited from. He was in the Navy, and got to go to college and law school off the GI Bill, and benefited from the tremendous infrastructure and growth of the U.S. in the fifties and sixties.

And he succeeded in the time when social advancement was expected with hard work and ingenuity, which has grown more and more difficult. The cost of education and healthcare, which could be corrected through fairer taxation, are blocking this dream for many that he achieved. 

If the inequality issue didn’t exist, and if this country was truly shaped by meritocracy, I wouldn’t care so much about the fact that the wealthy are so easily avoiding paying their fair share. But this is a problem. And when I think about inheritance, it’s a broader concept. I want my two kids to inherit the dream of a democracy, and a society where their neighbors are not struggling just to survive.

Inequality.org: What’s something you learned about inequality or taxes that truly knocked your socks off during your research process?

JS: I was floored by the racial wealth gap. I really wanted to speak to people on both sides of the issue, which is why I have Grover Norquist and Frank Luntz, who are focused on the difference between equality and the equality of opportunity. Progressives want to redistribute wealth, they argue, and that’s unfair and “un-American”: What we should be pushing for is equality of opportunity.

But the system has created such an ingrained difference in the wealth accumulation of white and Black families, whether because of the inability to take advantage of loans from redlining, or missing out on the accrued generational benefits from stock ownership. Now with the further avoidance of estate taxes and taxes in general, as wealth just piles up, equality of opportunity can’t exist!! It’s completely unfair and needs to be addressed.

I also found it significant to learn how few estates are actually subjected to the estate tax: less than .1 percent are subjected to it, or about 4,000 out of the millions of people who pass away each year. The way the estate tax has been branded and spoken about, with this red herring of the “small family farmers,” makes everyday people think that they’re going to be affected when it’s really just a few families.

And as Gary Cohn said, it’s so easy to avoid paying at all, and that leaves a hole in our treasury that creates a self-perpetuating problem. When things are underfunded, then they don’t work, and people feel that they don’t want to pay taxes, because who wants to pay for a sh*tty system?

Inequality.org: You mentioned at your premiere that you consider this a New York film. Could you tell us more about why?

JS: I was raised in the city when people were leaving New York in the 1970s. When you live here, you experience diversity and inequality because it’s right in your face, so you learn about the complexity of life and see problems up close. 

It was an important part of my education: I went to a fancy private school in the Bronx and as a kid I would take the bus from Park Avenue through Harlem. Every day I’d look out the window and see, literally within the space of two blocks, fancy buildings become burned out shells of buildings, and the neighborhoods change dramatically.

In some ways that was as important as the education I got when I got to school, because it was haunting, and too many kids were stuck in our bubble.

Interestingly, my dad, who grew up poor in East New York — and really appreciated the city and was really a New Yorker — escaped to Southwest Florida when he retired into a world that was really isolated from that diversity. And that isolation, along with an isolation of diversity of news sources because he was watching more and more right wing media, impacts the ability to feel empathy for and responsibility to your fellow Americans who don’t have the same opportunities you did and aren’t as lucky.

So he lost touch with why taxes are so important and why you have to pay your fair share. It’s more and more common that people isolate themselves and lose touch.

Inequality.org: How do you hope the film affects its audience? 

JS: I hope we spark discussion about why taxes are important, and what our responsibility is — with our here meaning those of us who have money and are privileged! The reality is that if those at the top pay their fair share, those at the bottom shouldn’t be burdened with more taxes, and will have more opportunities. 

There’s been inaction around money and taxes because the wealthy have so much leverage. The stepped up basis that allows for money to accrue untaxed and then pass onto the next generation untaxed as a double whammy. I’d love for people to see our film and start asking questions about what taxes are for. What do we owe society? What kind of society do we want our children to inherit? What is the American Dream, and what facilitated its definition, what facilitates its achievement?

There’s so many myths around it, that individual wealth creators go it alone. People deserve to benefit from their hard work and be successful. But it’s so easy to avoid taxes, and billionaires who borrow money instead of paying income tax? That needs to be seen as a truly unpatriotic behavior. 

Inequality is not inevitable, and impacts all of us. If you build a wall around yourself and hang onto everything you have, you might be happy inside the house, but that’s not why we live in America. There’s so much wealth and opportunity, enough to exchange and go around. 

I loved my dad a lot, and he gave me so much. We had different perspectives and histories, and fought about politics a lot, but we still respected each other. We were close and we loved each other. Hopefully our story can be an example of how differences don’t have to be divisions around the Thanksgiving table.