Posted on 06/20/2002 5:11:20 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
Two things in life are inevitable, the saying goes: death and taxes. But should they be so closely related that the death of a loved one is a taxable event?
Yet that's exactly what liberals, led by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), seem to believe. By a vote of 55-44 the Senate voted last week to kill the latest attempt to make the death tax repeal permanent. But only because Senator Daschle insisted on a parliamentary maneuver that required 60 votes instead of 51.
For the record, the $1.35 billion Bush tax-cut package approved by Congress last year phases out the death tax over time, increasing the exemption annually for the next seven years and then eliminating the tax (formally known as the "estate tax") completely in the year 2010. The trouble is the tax automatically springs back to life, zombie-like on January 1, 2011.
The House of Representatives had already approved legislation to make all of the 2001 tax provisions permanent. The Senate vote was far less ambitious and focused exclusively on a proposal by Republicans Jon Kyl of Arizona and Phil Gramm of Texas to kill the death tax permanently.
The case against the death tax is two-fold. First, there is the fairness matter. By what right does the government lay claim to any of the money or property that American citizens accumulate over a lifetime of hard work, saving, scrimping and investing? Where is it written in the Constitution or the Bible, that a visit by the Grim Reaper is an open invitation to the taxman to grab whatever he can grab? We pay all sorts of taxes during our lives: including income taxes, payroll taxes, sales taxes, fuel taxes, excise taxes. Isn't enough enough?
Not in Washington. Taxes, of course are to Congress what dog chow is to a hound: something you just can't get enough of. So persuading the necessary 60 senators to forgo even this minor source of revenues can be a hard sell.
It's not what they want to hear.
But it's true: the death tax is a tiny revenue-producer, accounting for just 1.5 percent of all federal taxes. While 1.5 percent amounted to $28 billion, the fact that about all of it was wasted on collection and compliance costs leads 60 Plus to observe that only the federal government can collect $28 billion and have nothing to show for it!
A 1998 study by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, for example, found that the death tax had reduced the "capital stock" of the US economy by $500 billion, or more than 3 percent, since its inception in 1916. Because this economic drag resulted in reduced income taxes (fewer businesses creating jobs means fewer people paying income taxes), the net effect of the tax is virtually nil.
Similarly, a 1999 study by economists Gary and Aldonna Robbins for the Institute of Policy Innovation in Dallas concluded that "there is neither social nor economic justification for the ... tax." The Robbins study showed that over time the increased economic activity spurred by death tax repeal would more than make up for any short-term losses.
It would have been much better, of course, if Congress had driven a stake through the heart of the death tax last year, when the tax-cut bill was on the table. Phasing out the tax, as they chose to do, gives Washington too many opportunities to revive it. And automatically reviving the tax a year after it is scheduled to expire was the silliest move of all.
The tax was designed nearly a century ago to even the economic playing field in the era of the "robber barons." The robber barons are long gone, as are many of their companies. The death tax has brought nothing but misery to the owners of countless family businesses and family farms in recent years. It is time to kill it once and for all.
The public, seniors especially, is hopping mad about a tax triggered only by death. It is past time to repeal this socially unconscionable, negative-revenue-producing, job-robbing tax permanently. In my nearly 40 years working in Washington, I've seen a lot of taxes come and not many go. Here's one tax whose time to go has come.
(James L. Martin is president of the 60 Plus Association, a national grass-roots senior citizens lobby headquartered in the Washington, D.C., area.)
Free Congress Foundation
This is an opportunity for the GOP to do to the Democrats in reality what the Democrats do to them with deception.
Since most women are Democrats,
More and more, Democrats have become the party of women, Republicans the party of men. Lake says women now always choose Democrats by as much as 11 to 12 percentage points in congressional elections, while men prefer Republicans by similar advantages. USA Today
it’s time that husbands use the ‘American Tax System Plan’ to show women that the Democrats’ tax plan is un-fair.
How do we do that? Simple require your wife to turn over all her earnings to her husband in the form of a ‘tax’. Then the husband will return an amount of money he feels is necessary for the wife to live.
Once the wife realizes that this is not ‘fair’ to take the money from the person who earns it and for someone else to determine how much they get to keep, we shall have demonstrated the unfairness of a tax such as the Estate Tax..
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