Paris Hilton Tax Cut Set To Pass House

by Chris Bowers, Wed Apr 13, 2005 at 08:23:36 AM EDT

Trust fund babies rejoice. Republicans are about to guarantee that you will never have to work a day in your lives: Today, the House is expected to vote to permanently repeal the estate tax, moving the Mars candy, Gallo wine and Campbell soup fortunes one step closer to a goal that once seemed quixotic at best: ending all taxation on inheritances. It worked the way most bad policies work. Misinformation and good framing from the Republican Noise Machine has been show to trump sound policy every time: The secret of the repeal movement's success has been its appeal to principle over economics. While repeal opponents bellowed that only the richest of the rich would ever pay the estate tax, proponents appealed to Americans' sense of fairness, that individuals have the natural right to pass on their wealth to their children.

The most recent Internal Revenue Service data back opponents' claims. In 2001, out of 2,363,100 total adult deaths, only 49,911 -- 2.1 percent -- had estates large enough to be hit by the estate tax. That was down from 2.3 percent in 1999. The value of the taxed estates in 2001 averaged nearly $2.7 million.

Of course, we could quote figures like this until The Simple Life is finally off the air. However, it won't do much to stop this:By 1994, Newt Gingrich's Republican insurgents had latched onto the estate tax issue, but the Contract With America called for an estate tax reduction, not repeal. In 1995, Luntz poll-tested the term "death tax" and advised the new GOP majority to never use the terms "inheritance" or "estate tax" again.

By then, Soldano's Policy and Taxation Group was spending more than $250,000 a year on lobbying. A parade of small-business owners and family farmers appealed to their congressmen, worried that they could not pass on their enterprises to their children, even though most of them would not be affected by the tax.

"There's been a sustained, determined campaign of misinformation that in the end has left the American people with a very different notion of what the estate tax is and does than actually exists," Pomeroy said.

But ultimately, whether people believe the estate tax will affect them has little bearing on support for repeal. Early this year, with Soldano's money, Luntz again began polling, this time in the face of record budget deficits and lingering economic unease. More than 80 percent called the taxation of inheritances "extreme." About 64 percent said they favored "death tax" repeal. Support fell to a still-strong 56 percent when asked whether they favored repeal, even if it temporarily boosted the budget deficit.

The truth alone will not set us free. The sans-culottes are storming the big box stores of exuburbia everywhere, demanding that their landed aristocratic masters be given more power. This is what plutocracy looks like.

Tags: Money (all tags)

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10 Comments

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Is there any hope at all
that this can be bottled up in the Senate?
by wilder 2005-04-13 08:29AM | 0 recs
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The joke is on them
Repealing the estate tax is great for preserving a large family business or for the ultra-rich who never plan on selling the family estate, but it is going to suck big time for people who inherit that house on acreage that your parents bought for $10,000 and which is now zoned for multi-family. Because you will be paying capital gains tax on the whole shooting match when it comes time to sell.

The estate tax raises a lot of money, but it also chops a lot of paperwork out. Sure the rate is high but your heirs get whatever is left over at its new basis. Now they get to track home improvement costs for decades, or take it in the shorts come time to sell Gramma's house.

A lot of people are going to look back on that $3 million dollar exemption and wish they never bought a single Mars bar or a can of Campbells soup.

by Bruce Webb 2005-04-13 08:43AM | 0 recs
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Of course...
If we Dems ever get our act together and control Congress and the White House, we'll be inheriting a very very taxing situation.  By then there will be demands for renewing our infrastructure and social programs and we be the ones who have to bring back dreaded taxes.  It's all part of the game.

We can thank the airheads who fall for the notion that, thanks to Bush, they'll grow up to be rich and have something to pass on to their children.  What with the falling dollar, scarcity of oil, grim reductions in social programs, rising costs of higher education, astronomical costs of healthcare, increasingly dire public health problems, few jobs... they won't grow up to be rich.  

I wonder if TV series will continue to portray Americans as well-off and comfortable consumers in, say, 2015!

by Bean 2005-04-13 08:47AM | 0 recs
4a2fab88-ed3b-47a4-8f14-3ec8a24504ac_normal
arguing over
"Someone will fall below it. Someone will be above it," Hulshof said of arbitrary markers exempting some estates from taxation.

Many Democrats argue that the country cannot afford the roughly $290 billion it would cost over a decade to eliminate the tax while budget deficits mount and expenditures for homeland security and war increase.

"The Democratic plan would increase the size of an estate exempt from tax to $3 million for an individual and $6 million for a couple beginning next year. It would reduce government revenue $70 billion.

Pomeroy said the change would eliminate 99.7 percent of estates from taxation."


Amazing that. The Republicans have successfully framed a tax-break of $220B, for the top .3%, as equal to a tax-break of $70B for the other 97.70%. What's equally amazing, is that the Democrats in DC cannot win on this issue.
And why? Maybe because many of them are in that 3/10ths of 1% themselves.
by Jerome Armstrong 2005-04-13 09:06AM | 0 recs
Shadow_head_small
So the Tax on Free Money
is going to be repealed by the Friends of Filthy Rich, also known as the Republican Party.

The Free Money tax is completely in keeping with the American way of life. We do not believe in a class of lordship and heriditary barons. We got rid of them 229 years ago and if we have to we'll get rid of them again.

by Andrew C White 2005-04-13 09:23AM | 0 recs
Shadow_head_small
But, aren't Trustafarians a key constituency
of the radical left?  

Michael Barone thinks so.  So why would the Republicans provide such a benefit to that (imaginary) enemy demographic?

I swear, the Republicans and their apparatchiks are one big proto-fascist clown show.  I'm constantly torn between being scared and laughing my ass off.

by paperwight 2005-04-13 12:17PM | 0 recs
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This bill pass 272 to 162:
What I want to know is who are the bastard Democrats that voted for this?

There's got to be almost 50 of them and everyone of them needs to face a primary challange.

by Painter2004 2005-04-13 02:31PM | 0 recs
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Re: This bill pass 272 to 162:
Another bi-partisan pig courtesy of the corporate parties: Thanks y'all.  
by Seldom Seen Smith 2005-04-13 06:37PM | 0 recs
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The Walton Family Tax Cut
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

FDR, Second Inaugural Address, Wednesday, January 20, 1937
http://aol1.infoplease.com/t/hist/inaugural/38.html

by piniella 2005-04-14 01:53AM | 0 recs
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I am very interested in this
I am very interested in this
尖锐湿疣 性病 尖锐湿疣 咪喹莫特 明欣利迪 疣迪 尖锐湿疣 咪喹莫特 咪喹莫特 疣迪 明欣利迪 疣迪 艾达乐 咪喹莫特 尖锐湿疣 尖锐湿疣 尖锐湿疣 尖锐湿疣
by hpvv 2005-12-19 10:01PM | 0 recs

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