Estate Tax Repeal Rises Again

Following on the heels of yesterday’s “marriage protection” foolishness, Bill Frist in his wisdom has decided that the next priority for the Senate to address is the growing gap between rich and poor. The Republican strategy, as you might have guessed, is to make the gap larger. With luck, they won’t be any more successful with this than they were with yesterday’s legislation.

Since the Republicans like to call it the “death tax”, you might think the estate tax applies to everyone who dies. In fact it currently affects only 1 in 200 estates. Nevertheless, the Republicans don’t just want to lower it or tinker with it — they want to do away with it entirely, so that even billionaires can leave their entire estates to their heirs without paying a penny in taxes. It fits in with the general plan of eliminating taxes on all forms of income for the rich (like capital gains), leaving the working class to shoulder the entire burden of paying for government services through taxes on wages.

On the other hand, some of us think that a tax that affects only people who have done nothing to earn the money (other than having the luck of being born into the right family) is not a bad kind of tax to have, if you must have taxes — which we must if we want to have a government. Let’s hope the forces of sanity prevail, and this repeal is defeated again.

The photo above is from a Billionaires for Bush event I participated in back on April 25. It was part of a press conference by Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy reporting that lobbying for the estate tax repeal was largely funded by 18 ultra-wealthy families who stand to gain billions if it passes. Note that the figures on the graph showing the percentage gain from “investing” in lobbying for the legislation are actually missing two zeros.

Update: The repeal attempt failed again, falling three votes short of the 60 needed for cloture. Most Democrats voted on the side of the average American, along with Republicans Lincoln Chafee (RI) and George Voinovich (OH). Democrats Max Baucus (MT), Blanche Lincoln (AR), Ben Nelson (NE), and Bill Nelson (FL) inexplicably voted for cloture. Unfortunately, the issue will likely return before the end of this Congress.