|
|
"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
|
Restore the Estate Tax!
|
|---|
| Parent(s) |
Issue
|
| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP Jul 22, 2010 11:35am |
| Logged |
0
|
| Category | Event |
| Author | Daniel Gross |
| Media | Magazine - Newsweek |
| News Date | Thursday, July 22, 2010 05:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | So, a Treasury secretary, a labor union leader, a hedge-fund billionaire, and an heiress walk into a conference call.
It’s not a Catskills joke. It was the teleconference staged Wednesday morning by United for a Fair Economy’s Responsible Wealth Project to discuss the need to reinstate the estate tax. The situation surrounding the estate tax is truly bizarre. The excellent book Death by a Thousand Cuts, by Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro, describes how a tax that falls on the slimmest minority of Americans was set on the path to extinction in 2001. Legislation called for the tax to decline to the point where it disappear entirely in 2010. Then it would bounce back to its pre-2001 level in 2011. The Republican advocates of the legislation assumed that Congress would act in the interim to permanently abolish the tax. But they didn’t, in large measure because—shocker!—Republicans in 2009 refused to cooperate on a compromise. And so 2010 is turning into excellent time for rich people to die. Senators Jon Kyl (R-Arizona) and Blanche Lincoln (D-Arkansas) are working on a proposal to reduce estate taxes going forward. (They are an odd pair: The number of Arkansans subject to the estate tax each year could fit into the master bathroom of a Greenwich, Ct., mansion, and Kyl is one of those foolish deficit faux-hawks who can’t abide increases in debt but is happy to push legislaton that would increase the deficit by a few hundred billion dollars.)
The purpose of the press conference was to show that abolishing the estate tax massively increases the deficit in order to help a few very wealthy people. |
| Share |
|
|
2¢
|
|
| Article | Read Full Article |
|
| Date |
Category |
Headline |
Article |
Contributor |
|
|
