Our cover this month, Entertainment on CBS (Set of eight posters) (45 ½ in. by 29 ½ in.) by Joe Kaufman sold for $4,860 at Swann Auction Galleries’ recent Vintage Posters Featuring Highlights from the Gail Chisholm Collection auction in New York City on March 1,
2018. Kaufman was a popular magazine and children’s book illustrator who won numerous awards, including the prestigious Art Directors Club medal in 1948.
The poster on our cover is an illustration of the various themes of CBS’ weekly broadcast lineup and an ode to the Golden Age of television. The “Golden Age” refers to the emergence of live television as a national medium during the United States’ postwar period in the 1950s. The proliferation of dramas, created for the affluent audience (television sets were expensive and a luxury back then) who was attracted to the serious drama of Broadway shows, was largely responsible for this rise in U.S. consumption of television. As more people gained access to this medium, the genres expanded to include shows such as situation comedies, science fiction, news and sports, as well as many of the other programs that exist today. Because of the production of many internationally acclaimed television programs in the United States, we’re now in what many have dubbed the “New Golden Age” of television.
Coincidentally, as Robert W. Finnegan points out in his article “Planning With Life Insurance in Uncertain Times,” we’re also in the “Golden Age” of estate planning. Estate planners should rest assured then, that despite the doubling of the gift, estate and generation-skipping transfer tax exemption under the new Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (the Act), there’s still plenty of work to be done and questions to be answered for clients. The articles in this issue shed light on many of the reasons why clients shouldn’t rely on the Act as a reason to delay planning.