Posted on 09/05/2005 1:03:18 PM PDT by Diligent
Exploding the myth of a 'costless society'
2005-09-05 / Knight Ridder / By Matthew Gardner
When Congress left town for its August recess, the Republican leadership made it clear that one of its first acts after Labor Day would be a vote on permanent repeal of the federal estate tax.
As the dog days of August began, the 10-year, US$290 billion cost of permanent repeal seemed daunting to good-government advocates. But the Republican leadership in Congress casually brushed aside concerns that in the context of continuing, historically large budget deficits, unfunded tax cuts would further endanger our nation's ability to fund important services.
And so it seemed likely that when September came, the Republican leadership would once again be able to perpetuate the "costless society" myth it has so successfully propagated since 2001, where everyone eats free and no one pays the bill.
Hurricane Katrina has exploded this myth. There is growing evidence that the federal government has chronically underfunded flood prevention efforts in New Orleans and surrounding areas in recent years - and the events of this week have shown that federal emergency management efforts are simply not up to the task of providing the basic health and security needs of displaced New Orleans residents.
The wealthiest nation in the world has simply failed its citizens - first, by underfunding levee repairs, and second, by its cripplingly slow and ineffective response to Monday's hurricane. At a time of crisis, our first-world nation has demonstrated a shockingly third-world capability to care for its citizens.
Wake-up call
This glaring failure should be a wake-up call for anyone who still believes that the administration's tax cuts have not hampered its ability to effectively prosecute multiple wars while providing basic services to its own citizens.
On Wednesday, the president received this wake-up call, emerging from his Crawford, Texas, ranch for a quick flyover of the devastation in Louisiana and Mississippi. The increasingly obvious linkage between the federal government's persistent neglect of our national infrastructure and this landscape-changing catastrophe may yet force him to rethink his tax-cutting binge.
One can only hope that Bush and leaders in Congress will awaken to the equally obvious linkage between massive budget deficits and the rash of unaffordable, poorly targeted tax cuts enacted since 2001, and rethink the decision to push for estate tax repeal.
The compelling arguments against estate tax repeal are, by now, familiar to many of us. Only the very wealthiest estates ever pay a dime in estate tax. Despite the fearmongering of the anti-"death tax" crowd, the cold hard fact is that no one can seem to find an actual small business or family farm that has been forcibly broken up in order to pay the tax. And the administration's charge that the tax represents "double taxation" is provably false: much of the value of taxable estates is in the form of unrealized capital gains that have never been taxed.
Important choice
Before Katrina, the administration managed to avoid confronting these simple facts. And unfortunately, the administration's behavior last week suggests that its absence from the reality-based community may continue.
Responding to questions about the administration's persistence in underfunding flood control efforts, White House press secretary Scott McClellan asserted in a Thursday news conference that "flood control has been a priority of this administration from day one." His disconnect with last week's horrible reality was as painfully obvious as his previous insistence on identifying unfunded estate tax repeal as a way to "promote ... fairness in the tax code."
In both cases, McClellan's rhetoric simply flies in the face of the facts.
On Tuesday, congressional leaders will face an important choice. They can confront the horrible reality of a nation that is incapable of caring for its most vulnerable citizens in their time of greatest need - or they can continue to pretend that tax cuts for the wealthiest few impose no costs on the nation as a whole.
But public policy has serious consequences. The events of the last week have tragically demonstrated the failure of Congress' "free lunch" school of thought - a lesson that our elected officials would do well to remember.
Matthew Gardner is State Tax Policy Director for Citizens for Tax Justice.
A lot of distortions and outright lies in this article. The funding of levee repairs (or lack of it) was not what caused the levee failure, but expecting truth from a journalist these days is like expecting moral behavior from crack whores....
What is this "unfunded tax cuts' horseshirt?
Cut the taxes, and they'll HAVE to cut the unfunded spending.
The money and property in any estate has already been taxed.
"If ye shall not work, then ye shall not eat" -- St. Paul
Sounds as though he is not gainfully employed.
But not Capital Gains.
Fact is, the first levee break was at the location most recently re-inforced. Planned levee work by the Corp was shelved locally and funding diverted. Four years of serious warnings by the NOAA, NWS and the Corp were dealt with by Riverboat Gamblers.
Democrats in Action, I believe is the term.
I caught that "unfunded tax cut" crap too.
That was a masterpiece of Orwellian Distortion. Is there a hall of fame for this kind of egregious nonsense?
How come "tax fairness" never involves lowering taxes or returning to constitutional forms of taxation?
Oh, never mind.
Except he's not a journalist. Not even a columnist or editorialist. Lobbying against tax cuts is his job. And he gets paid based on how well he does it.
Perhaps one reason journalists have such a low reputation is that they turn over their pages to outright activists and lobbyists. In any event, this sort of column is the "junk mail" of American journalism.
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