This article is pretty bad at actually conveying information. It’s nominally about trusts in South Dakota, but first there’s a story for many paragraphs about the history of some unrelated laws that make a few random South Dakotans look bad.

So the main thing these South Dakota trusts actually do isn’t evading taxes, it’s just lasting an indefinite amount of time, being private, and not putting many restrictions on what you can do with the money. None of those seem that bad to me.

Way down at the end of the article, it even mentions that many other states have now copied the South Dakota trust rules, so there’s nothing particularly unique about them nowadays, and South Dakota changing their laws probably wouldn’t have any effect. Well okay, that kind of defeats the whole point of the article though, which was that South Dakota was doing something bad.

The one interesting thing to me is that when cracking down on offshore accounts, the US created some international standards that the US states don’t have to follow themselves. In a sense that was a protectionist move, which I didn’t realize before.