Harvey Schein was once one of the most influential of globe-trotting Fortune 500 CEOs.
Darting between New York and Tokyo in the 1970s, he ran the American arm of Sony, a brand that revolutionized consumer technology and helped kick off what became a new digital era.
Schein doubled Sony’s sales in the U.S., making him one the industry’s most prominent leaders, until 1978, when Sony cofounder Akio Morita pushed him out for being too combative.
That part of Schein’s career has been documented in magazine profiles and business books. But a new film by his director son, Justin Schein, illuminates his late father’s other battle, this one with the U.S. tax code.
In Death & Taxes, viewers meet a retired Harvey Schein at home, obsessing over saving money and protecting the spoils of his investments from the IRS. The child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Schein grew up in a poor section of Brooklyn and inherited little when his parents passed. He wanted his legacy to be one of largesse. “It’s not that I’m selfish for myself,” he says at one point in the documentary. “It’s for you, your progeny, their progeny.”
Schein sought to ensure that his kin would live comfortably after he died, but his fixation with living frugally and avoiding taxes caused heartache while he lived. “My mother bore the brunt of his anger and toughness,” Justin Schein tells Fortune. His father even insisted on moving with his wife to Florida for tax purposes, dismissing her deep objections.
Schein’s story is animated by footage of family meetings and interviews his son captured in the two decades before Schein’s death, in 2008. The family tale becomes the vehicle for investigating the moral questions that shape the current debate about the so-called “death tax,” and the mindset of the mega-rich who believe high estate taxes are unAmerican.
For the past several decades, successive Republican presidents have raised the minimum threshold at which the wealthy need to pay estate taxes, reduced the tax rate, or both. Democratic leaders have generally done the opposite, seeing estate taxes as a means to chip away at wealth concentration at the top of the socioeconomic ladder.
Today, the estate tax in the U.S. is 40% and only applies to estates worth at least $13.6 million per individual. That’s more than double the individual exemption, $5.6 million, that was allowed before former president Donald Trump took office in 2017. (The figure is adjusted for inflation annually.)
Trump effectively cut the estate tax for thousands of extremely wealthy U.S. families when his administration enacted the Tax Code and Jobs Act, a set of policies set to expire early next year. With Trump returning to office, and with a Republican-controlled Congress, economists expect his tax code to be extended, though it’s also possible that Republicans will repeal the estate tax entirely. By comparison, in her failed run for the presidency, Vice President Kamala Harris said she supported a tax plan overhaul that would have seen the exemption lowered to $3.5 million, thereby implicating thousands of additional people.