How to Make A Big Tax-Free Gift to Your Child or Grandchild

Anyone who has considered giving a substantial gift to a child or grandchild has to think about the potential consequences under federal law.  These could include the federal gift tax, estate tax and generation skipping transfer tax.  And we haven't gotten to potential state taxes yet, which don't necessarily work the same way as federal taxes.

But there's a simple workaround to all these taxes:  pay for your child's or grandchild's college education.  The burden of college loans is well-known.  If a student borrows $100,000 for college and/or medical, law, or other graduate school, and pays 8% per year over a 20-year repayment process, the interest costs actually exceed the $100,000 principal amount of the loan (by about $750).  If you contribute $100,000 to that student's education, you just in effect transferred over $200,000 to that student, all without any consequences under federal or state estate, gift or similar laws.  If the student potentially has to borrow larger amounts ($200,000 of educational debt is hardly unusual these days), the amount you can give tax-free to your child or grandchild increases proportionately.

Some parents think it's better to make kids bear the costs of college in order to teach them responsibility.  There are many ways to teach responsibility, and they should begin well before the child reaches college age.  If a kid isn't responsible by age 18, dumping a truckload of student debt on him or her isn't likely to improve the situation. 

If you can't pay the full cost of a kid's education, consider how much you can pay.  Whatever you provide reduces the potential need for loans, and the tax-free gift you give confers lifetime benefits on the kid.  And if you're not wealthy enough to face liability for gift, estate or similar taxes, remember that whatever amount of educational costs you cover still provides a large gift because the child might otherwise have to borrow the money and pay a lot of interest.  Even if you don't get to thumb your nose at the tax man, you give your kid a big lifelong hug and kiss. 

Obama's 529 Mistakes

President Obama's proposal to tax earnings distributed from 529 college plans derived from future contributions is one of the worst ideas he's had in tax policy.  He would make withdrawals derived from earnings on new contributions taxable to the student (although withdrawals derived from earnings on funds already contributed would remain tax-free).  Let us count the ways this makes no sense.

Defies Tax Logic.  The redistribution of income through a progressive tax structure is a concept that virtually all Americans agree on, including many who are very wealthy.  However, Obama's 529 proposal creates a much smaller redistribution loop consisting of college students (and perhaps indirectly their families).  Students from more prosperous families will pay taxes that will subsidize students from less well-off families.  Why have a redistribution loop consisting of only the student community?  If that makes sense, why not have wealthier farmers subsidize less wealthy ones?  And why not have higher earning servers and bartenders (e.g., those at high end restaurants and hotels)  subsidizing the employees at Mickey D's.  Since college educations are so important to America's future, subsidies for middle-class and less fortunate students shouldn't come at the expense of other students who, through no choice of their own, were born into more prosperous families.  If redistribution of income is a societal goal, it shouldn't be done in a distorted way like this. 

Bad Social Policy.  Having children and raising them well is beneficial for America as a nation.  A healthy birth rate is crucial to America's future success as a nation.  More prosperous families are better able to afford to have children and raise them well.  The extremely low birth rates in Japan and Europe have seriously impaired the economies--and futures--of those nations.  Disincentives to have and educate children shouldn't be built into the tax code.

Bad Trickle Down.  Obama's 529 proposal effectively raises the cost of college for students from more prosperous families.  It defies economic logic to believe that won't have consequences.  Some students might lose opportunities when this happens.  Let's take this hypothetical example to see how that could work.  Valedictoria, a brilliant high school student from a well-off but not rich family, might barely be able to afford the unconscionably high costs of an Ivy League school if 529 plans remain unchanged.  But she would opt for a less expensive school (the well-regarded University of Home State) with the Obama changes because she doesn't want to or can't take on the additional debt required for the Ivy League (and wants to spare her parents that burden).  She opts for the less expensive school.  Her enrollment there could bump out a student who was marginally able to gain admission to the University of Home State.  The marginal applicant then goes to a less-well regarded school, perhaps losing educational quality and opportunities he might have had at the University of Home State.  Is the nation somehow better off if this happens?

Punishes Self-Sufficiency.  The people who fund 529 plans are the kind of people who, in past generations, would have been viewed as good citizens prudently saving for the future education and improvement of their children.  They hope not to rely on handouts or loans or governments to finance their childrens' educations.  They'd like do it themselves, thank you.  Indeed, self-sufficiency was once regarded as one of the most golden of American virtues.  In a land where there were many opportunities, but also many hazards, the self-sufficient were the bedrock and pillars of a growing nation that wanted to keep growing.  To be self-sufficient, you necessarily have to build your wealth.  Why penalize self-sufficiency by taxing college savings?   We have become a nation obsessed with instant gratification, the faux celebrity status offered by social networking, easy credit for all, and bailouts for almost every need imaginable.  Will discouraging self-sufficiency improve things? 

The Online Challenge For Higher Education

Higher education is moving online, and that's a trend that will continue and expand.  The costs of college degrees have risen sharply over the past 40 years and this trend shows few signs of abating.  Cost considerations alone will force many students to look for online alternatives.  It doesn't matter that physical institutions offer the benefits of face-to-face classroom interactions and social opportunities that could create lifetime friendships.  When college costs continue to rise 5% or more a year, and incomes rise scarcely at all (except for the top few percent), numerous students from less privileged backgrounds will be financially squeezed out of traditional college experiences.  How quickly and how far online education grows depends on how purveyors of online education and traditional colleges confront certain basic challenges.

Online education has to prove that it can provide a quality education, one that makes its graduates competitive in the marketplace for good, well-paying jobs.  Online students obviously won't enjoy football Saturdays, beer in the student union, or impromptu chats with professors; nor will they be able to disgrace themselves with embarrassing behavior on fraternity row on weekend nights.  And it's difficult to replicate certain educational experiences online--laboratory work for physics and chemistry classes isn't quite the same if all you're doing is watching someone else do it through a computer monitor.  But the educational content of many, and perhaps most, college courses can be presented online with little or no loss of substance.

The online educational process may be more adaptable to meeting the needs of employers.  Physical institutions tend to subscribe to a traditional belief in the value of a broadly based liberal education.  While this concept remains valid, it isn't essential for everyone.  The billionaire founders of Microsoft, Oracle and Facebook are all college dropouts.  The denizens of academe may sneer at trade schools, but Europe's most powerful economy--Germany's--includes trade schooling as a crucial part of its educational system.   There is more to life than work, but life really stinks if you need a job and don't have one.  If online schooling can produce competitively employable graduates, it will transform education the same way that Amazon and Alibaba have transformed retailing.

Physical colleges have overpriced their product, and now confront an overcapacity problem.  The elite schools (the top 100 or so) will continue to do well because there will always be a certain segment of the population willing to pay (or having parents willing to pay) the costs of a name brand sheepskin.  Students aiming to be professionals--doctors, lawyers, and so on--will benefit from the friendships and contacts they make by being on campus. Students who don't really know what they want to do may be able to find a focus for their energies from exposure to the breadth of topics covered by a liberal education.

But the days when getting a college degree in anything and still being readily employable for a good salary are long gone.  There is increased pressure on kids at the high school level to choose a field and get a focused education so they can get a job.  Mid-tier colleges that provide good students with a good general education will find that's often not enough.  And even as they struggle to adapt, they'll be competing against numerous other mid-tier colleges that are struggling to adapt.  Reality is that a lot of mid-tier colleges have limited half-lives.

Much of the problem lies in the easy availability of educational loans.  There is no meaningful underwriting process for these loans.  Anyone admitted to an accredited institution can get a loan.  And, in order to preserve the principle that there's no free lunch, these non-underwritten loans are virtually impossible to discharge in bankruptcy.  For many kids, educational loans are like a pact with the devil--easy to enter into, but binding for eternity.  Many colleges are culpable participants in this pact.  They used the availability of easy education credit to raise tuition and fees much faster than incomes were rising, and to pad the compensation of administrators and top level college officials.  They aren't stuck with having to repay defaulted loans of their students.  So they have every incentive to encourage students to take out loans that benefit the college and its officials, but impose no costs when the educations they provide aren't sufficient to land the students good jobs.

Political considerations preclude any meaningful reform of college loan programs that would balance the costs and benefits, particularly by penalizing colleges for churning out graduates who can't repay loans that the colleges helped them obtain.  But economic forces will compel change.  Many high school graduates, looking at the bear trap college loans can become, will choose low cost routes through community college, trade schools, and, increasingly, online education.  Many physical colleges that have floated on the cushion of educational loans will have to downsize or close, as their cost structures cannot be sustained by their likely future revenue stream.  They will no doubt lobby the political process, whose knee jerk reaction will be to make college loans even easier to obtain.  But that will, if anything, make the problem worse, not better.  Students, having been served too many coffee drinks by well-educated baristas, won't take the bait. 

The economy as a whole is better off if students can obtain high quality, low cost educations.  Indeed, as the American middle class continues to decline, inexpensive higher education may offer one of the few avenues for recovery.  The end result will be workers who can succeed, prosper, and consume, rather than have pauper's lives in quasi-debtor prison. 

The Good Deficit

You already know we're in Oz.  The government manages the federal deficit by making across the board cuts everyone thought would be so extreme that both Democrats and Republicans would work together to find a more rational solution.  Ha ha ha.  The joke's on us.  The government manages the debt ceiling by kicking the can down the road every few months.  The can is getting awfully dented.  And most tellingly, a surprisingly large number of the members of Congress bear a distinct resemblance to the flying monkeys in the movie.

But even as there were bad witches in the movie, there were also good witches.  There are good deficits as well.  Government spending for things that government is particularly good at is generally desirable, even if it requires deficit spending.  For example, government is good at national defense, education, law enforcement, and building or subsidizing transportation systems.  Government is also very good at funding basic research.  Deficit spending to pursue these goals is money well spent because it fills gaps that the private sector leaves open.  These kinds of spending protect and enhance the national wealth and welfare.

There's another problem that should be tackled, even if it requires deficit spending.  The unemployment rate for Gen Y (a/k/a the Millenials) is much too high.  It's generally about twice the level for Baby Boomers, and the less educated Millenials have even higher rates of unemployment.  Those that are African-American and lack college degrees need not apply, especially if they are male.  Large numbers of the better educated Millenials are burdened with heavy educational debts.  The ones with debts of $100,000 or more could face decades of 21st Century-style indentured servitude to their creditors, whose claims they cannot oust in bankruptcy proceedings except in extremely distressed circumstances. 

Millenials who are unemployed and underemployed represent wasted human capital. Modern economies are knowledge based, and human capital is the most important form of national wealth.  A vivid example of the overarching importance of human capital can be found in the aftermath of World War II.  Germany and Japan, the devastated losers (who deserved to lose), had only limited industrial capacity and not enough food to feed their populations.  But they also retained the advanced industrial knowledge they had acquired in building and supporting their massive and highly capable war machines.  Required by Allied occupation authorities to turn that knowledge to peaceful purposes, the two losing nations rebuilt their economies rapidly, and within three decades became industrial powerhouses.  Because they still had their human capital after the war, they could rebuild their tangible assets and prosper.

As a nation, we can't afford to let the human capital of Gen Y atrophy.  They are starting their working lives now, a crucial time for developing the skills of a self-supporting adult.  It's in your twenties and thirties that you learn how to apply all your book learning to the practical needs and purposes of the working world.  Learn those lessons well, and you'll be productive for 40 or more years.  Failing to learn them can result in permanent stunting of one's career.

Add a heavy load of school debt to the mix, and we can see how unemployed and underemployed Millenials could become a permanent economic underclass, unable to escape a shadow world of part-time jobs and episodic contract work, trailed by the baying of creditors hounding them at every turn. 

It's time to revive the Civilian Conservation Corps, 21st Century style.  The CCC of the 1930s employed some 3 million young Americans over the course of its decade of existence.  They were paid very modest wages, most of which were given to their parents (although the employees also received food and housing in addition to their pay).  They did mostly physical labor, as such work was integral to America's 1930s industrial economy.  The program was very popular with the American public, as it gave young people a chance to develop work skills and get a start in adult life.

A comparable program today could include jobs requiring manual labor.  America's highways, bridges and other infrastructure need a lot of maintenance.  America's cities need to be cleaned up, and abandoned buildings torn down, so that redevelopment can begin.  But there are many white collar jobs that need to be done as well.  Rural areas and inner cities lack physicians and other health care providers.  Many school districts are strapped for funding and need more teachers and staff for everything ranging from special education to music and drama.  Many jurisdictions have gravely inadequate funding for public defenders.  Criminal defendants, whom the law in its majesty presumes innocent until proven guilty, have little means to defend themselves and give their presumption of innocence tangible effect.  The poor need legal services for civil matters as well, such as battling indifferent landlords.  The list could go on.

CCC-21st Century jobs should be real jobs, not make work.  We can't ask taxpayers to pay people to dig holes and fill them up.  The pay should be low, because these aren't meant to be career jobs.  They are a way to give young people a start.  Part of the compensation should include generous provisions for government assistance in repaying school debt.  In effect, the government would help young people offload their school debt so they can get a fresh start in life.  Yes, yes, yes, there are countervailing considerations about holding people responsible for their debts and not bailing people out, etc., etc.  But we let egregious spendthrifts stiff their creditors for non-education debt as a matter of course in bankruptcy.  And we bail out really large financial institutions run by millionaire executives.  The burden of educational debt is getting to be too much.  As some guy put it about 400 years ago, the quality of mercy is not strained.  Let's be realistic instead of Puritanically moralistic.

Those CCC-21st Century employees who haven't gone to college could be compensated with the right to educational subsidies, akin to the GI Bill.  These young people could then go to college with less need for debt.  Their human capital would be enriched.

This isn't a perfect solution, and won't solve all the problems of Gen Y.  But it would give many of them a start.  And that's what they need.  Deficit spending for another CCC would be money well-spent.  The private sector isn't helping these people.  Government action is the only alternative.  We don't need more stimulus in the form of Federal Reserve money printing.  We could benefit greatly from stimulus in the form of deficit spending invested in our young adults.