Ashley Hinson ‘death tax’ story collides with truth

Maybe you’ve seen Republican Senate nominee Ashley Hinson’s TV ad.

“My father is a first generation hedge fund manager,” says a young, well-dressed man leaning on a Ferrari. “He’s been making gobs of money for as long as I can remember. Someday, I’ll inherit tens of millions of dollars, or more!

“But the death tax could ruin everything. I could be just super rich instead of super duper rich.

“Ashley Hinson is working to eliminate the death tax, so I don’t have to sell our home in Aspen or our French vineyard. Our way of life is protected for the next generation.”

OK, this is not Hinson’s new ad. But it’s more accurate than the real one, with a farmer lamenting how the federal inheritance tax will kill his family farm.

Considering an estate inherited by a couple has to be worth more than $30 million, or $15 million for an individual, to trigger any inheritance tax, the spawn of a top hedge fund manager is more likely to pay the death tax than descendants inheriting a 100-year-old farm.

In 2023, according to the Center for American Progress, only the 4,000 largest estates paid any inheritance tax at all. And that’s when the exemption for a couple was $25.8 million.

But how many family farms had to be sold to pay the death tax?

“In the minds of voters, the family farmer is a sympathetic taxpayer who is cash poor but holds valuable property,” North Carolina law professor Kathleen Thomas wrote in a study titled “Tax and the Myth of the Family Farm” published in 2025 in the Iowa Law Review.

“Yet, there is no empirical evidence that any family farm has ever been sold in the United States to fund federal taxes,” Thomas wrote. Voters, she argues, love a good story more than facts.

In 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 0.16% of farm estates, or about 50 farms, owed any inheritance tax. None of them had to be sold to pay the taxes.

But Hinson is a loyal foot soldier in Donald Trump’s war on honesty.

“Very importantly, we saved 2 million American farms from extinction by virtually ending the unfair estate tax,” Trump told farmers in March. The USDA reports there are 1.8 million farms in the U.S., so that’s some trick.

Hinson just can’t stop cutting wealthy people’s taxes. She voted for the Bulging Beastly Bill, including, over 10 years, a $752 billion business tax cut, a $340 billion income tax cut in the top marginal rate and a $212 billion estate tax break. And don’t forget a $737 million deduction for pass-through income, which applies to income earned by Hinson’s family from millions of dollars in private stocks, according to Iowa Starting Line.

The top 10% thanks you for your service.

Finance, insurance and real estate industries have donated more than $3.5 million to Hinson’s campaigns since 2020, according to opensecrets.org. Maybe some hedge fund managers chipped in.

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