Deborah S Gordon

While not really about law or even estate planning, it does have a list of questions to ask when youre hiring an attorney that I plan to share with my Trusts & Estates students, including "Is trust and estate law your main focus? HOW THE TAX CODE MADE AN AMERICAN ARISTOCRACY Ray D. Madoff, University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street Chicago, IL 60637, 192 pages, $24.99 The Second Estate, by Boston College Law School Professor Ray D. Madoff, is a bird's eye view of the tax code, its history and some of the counterintuitive outcomes it creates. While a number of factors determine long term capital gains rates, the average rate is 15%, and the highest is 20% - far less than the highest income tax rates. Madoff shows that not only is the tax burden mostly on income from wages, but points out that employees also pay "payroll taxes," that is, taxes taken out of paychecks to fund programs for social security and Medicare. [...]in effect, wage earners pay taxes twice on the same wages.

George Stefanou, Streamline Books, 10000 Marshall Dr., Lenexa, KS 66215, 274 pages, $24.95 In Two-Comma Wealth: Investment, Tax, and Estate Strategies to Consider When Your Net Worth Exceeds a Million Dollars, author George Stefanou provides an accessible and engaging roadmap for navigating the emotional, fiscal, behavioral, and legacy-building components of what he describes as "substantial financial success": having a net worth of a million dollars or more in investable assets. Because this is the story of his own family, Stefanou's voice comes through in the stories he tells and the advice he offers. What | liked most about this book was the conversational quality it brought to such familiar topics as legacy planning, tax planning, and business succession planning.