Estate Tax Cut? How Can They?
May 31st, 2006 | by Paul Merda |Come on righties, wake up. The Estate Tax only affects 1% of our population and yet we see the GOP trying really, really hard to repeal it. The repeal would cost around $1 Trillion (that’s with a T) over the first decade. This decade, when many boomers are looking to retire and starting to cash in on SS and Medicare. We are spending hundreds of billions more than we are taking in and yet, the GOP wants to take more revenue away from the Treasury. Another story of the rich getting richer…
A decades-long campaign by right-wing activists (brilliantly documented by Yale professors Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro in their book “Death by a Thousand Cuts”) has convinced many Americans that the estate tax poses a threat to countless hardworking families. That was always nonsense, and under the estate tax revisions that almost all Democrats support — raising the threshold for eligibility to $3.5 million for an individual and $7 million for a couple — it becomes more nonsensical still. Under the $3.5 million exemption, the number of family-owned small businesses required to pay any taxes in the year 2000 would have been just 94, according to a study by the Congressional Budget Office. The number of family farms that would have had to sell any assets to pay that tax would have been 13.
3 Responses to “Estate Tax Cut? How Can They?”
By ken grandlund on May 31, 2006 | Reply
Oh yes- repeal all the taxes! Who needs a government income stream? We’ll just keep borrowing from the Chinese.
Talk about a total disconnect between cause and effect going on.
By LiberPaul on May 31, 2006 | Reply
Indeed! What I don’t get is why so many Middle-Class people (GOP folks of course) think getting rid of the Estate Tax is such a great idea? It will only create an American Aristocracy, instead of the Meritocracy our Nation NEEDS…
By windspike on May 31, 2006 | Reply
The republicans are for no taxes now, so it looks worse for democrats who come into power and have to raise taxes to cover the cost of the loans they used to cover the exhorbinant cost of their precisous “war on terror.” In other words, we are in hock past our stars and stripes, and they want to look good today (vis-a-vis tax cuts now) in order to make those who fix the problem (loans plus interest means bigger taxes later) look bad in the future.
Does that make sense? I am thinking off the top of my head here – but I think it’s a ciclical thing.