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Featured Term (selected at random):PRIMOGENITUS The firstborn son. The policy in some societies of handing down property to the first born son in the family. Primogeniture. (Etym. Latin primus, first + Greek genesis, origin.) All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.

Baby boomers: Get ready for a double whammy. For years now, there's been a lot of talk about boomers getting tremendous windfalls as their parents pass on. Many boomers, in fact, have been lagging behind in their savings, betting on—hoping for—big bequests, especially since many of them suffered big losses in 2008. But for a growing number of boomers, things aren't going according to plan. The postwar generation is living longer—and many are spending their savings along the way. And, of course, many of them also took a hit in 2008. The result is that, as a group, boomers likely...

Is no age group safe from the fiscal woes of economic near-recession and pending entitlement crises? (Hint: No.) While we often focus on the troubles of young people unable to find employment and just chillin' on the parents' couches, and we're already well aware of the upcoming squeeze on Social Security as baby boomers begin to reach retirement age, here's a fun and exciting reminder from the Wall Street Journal. For years now, there's been a lot of talk about boomers getting tremendous windfalls as their parents pass on. Many boomers, in fact, have been lagging behind in their savings,...

Rags to riches tale of kitty who went from living on the streets to lap of luxury once down-on-his-luck stray cat has become the world’s richest kitty — thanks to a childless widow who left him $8.5 million in her will. Tommaso the black cat, who once scoured the streets of Rome for food, can now afford a gilded litter box with the inheritance. In a handwritten will penned shortly before her death last month, Maria Assunta, 94, ordered that the money from her real estate empire should keep the green-eyed feline she rescued in the lap of luxury. Animals...

Time magazine columnist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria says Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain’s “9-9-9” tax reform plan is “sloppy and, in parts, bizarre.” So he offered his own version of a tax reform plan in his weekly column in Time. In it, Zakaria argues that Americans should give the federal government half of what they inherit. “I would enact a 50 percent inheritance tax, because nothing is more un-American than an inherited elite that perpetuates itself,” Zakaria wrote for the magazine.

I’ve written before about the crisis of inequality in the United States and about the quasi-religious abhorrence of “wealth redistribution” that causes many Americans to oppose tax increases, even on the ultra rich. The conviction that taxation is intrinsically evil has achieved a sadomasochistic fervor in conservative circles—producing the Tea Party, their Republican zombies, and increasingly terrifying failures of governance. Happily, not all billionaires are content to hoard their money in silence. Earlier this week, Warren Buffett published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he criticized our current approach to raising revenue. As he has lamented many...

Bottom Line (last few paragraphs): Where the Great luxury-devouring Whore Jerusalem had failed, Jesus instructs his disciples to succeed. Instead of selling yourself to the kings of the earth, uphold the kingdom of God to them as a witness. Instead of striving after the treasures as if they were an end in themselves, use the treasures as a means to strive for the Kingdom. And toward this goal of spreading the kingdom—the very goal for which the original covenant called—God would be absolutely pleased to give them treasures and the kingdom. Based on the continuity of themes—wealth, kingdom, inheritance—Jesus’ teaching...

The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.(Romans 8:14-17)Christians are Sons of God. Not naturally, but by adoption, God has brought us into his own family,and given us the status of sons. Also by virtue of a new birth, having been born from above, we share in the Divine nature,and are Sons of God. John 1:12-13 brings out this twofold truth powerfully when he proclaims , *adoption,“As...

MUMBAI: If ever there is anything like a good year to die in, it is 2010 — but only if you are a millionaire US citizen. America’s ‘death tax’, which was repealed in 2010, is set to be introduced in the new year. Formally called the Estate Tax, it is levied on inheritance before it is passed on from one generation to the next. The tax was introduced in 1916 and has been in force ever since. The brief window in 2010 was the only exception, making it a freak year in which death carried a huge tax break. Under...

Mr. Frank's attitude seems to be that Americans need to justify why they should keep the money they inherit instead of the government needing to justify why they should be allowed to confiscate it. Video at link.

Grateful to have found work in this tough economy, Nick Martin teaches grape growing and winemaking each Saturday to a class of seven students in a simple metal building here at a satellite campus of Highland Community College. Then he drives 14 miles in an 11-year-old Ford Explorer to a sparsely furnished tract house that he rents for $900 a month on a dead-end street in McFarland, a smaller town. Just across the backyard is a shed that a neighbor uses to make cartridges for shooting the prairie dogs that infest the adjacent fields. It is a far cry from...

...Eccentric siblings Ethel Willson and Mabel Cook, described as like 'peas in a pod', drew up a joint will in 1991 leaving their possessions to their family and friends. Mrs Cook died aged 83 in 1995, but in 2006 her younger sister dramatically changed the will, just two months before her own death aged 92, leaving all but £10,000 of the estate to their hairdresser Jill Fraser. Now a High Court judge has ruled that because the sisters had a mutual agreement before Mrs Cook died, the original will should be honoured. The mutual wills drawn up in 1991 carved...

"...taxpayers don’t want the IRS to confiscate huge portions of what has been saved and invested over lifetimes of hard work. “You don’t know whether to commit suicide or just go on living and working,” says Eugene Sukup, an outspoken critic of the estate tax and the founder of Sukup Manufacturing, a maker of grain bins that employs 450 people in Sheffield, Iowa. Born in Nebraska during the Dust Bowl, the 81-year-old Mr. Sukup is a National Guard veteran and high school graduate who founded his firm, which now owns more than 70 patents, with $15,000 in 1963. He says...

Repeal of the estate tax imposes significant costs on the taxpaying public and promotes concentrations of wealth that harm our democracy. CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE REST

I have a friend who stands to inherit a small amount of money that was left to her by a relative. Question is, the executor of the estate isn't communicating with her at all (last spoke on March 9th) and she's not sure what's going on. The trust was set up in May 2009. The relative passed away last July. The executor tells her there "might be" a certain length of time that has to pass before the trust fund can be liquidated. It seems like the executor was being deliberately vague, but assuming this length of time is a...

Fiscal Policy: The new year saw the death of the estate tax. But like Freddie Krueger, this epitome of class warfare and wealth redistribution is sure to return to wreak havoc among the living. Once dubbed the "Paris Hilton" tax, the levy is supposed to target the inherited wealth of the super-rich who really didn't earn it or don't really need so much of it. Or so we're told. But at some point, even inherited wealth was created and taxed in its creation. The death tax is double taxation, and just because you can't take it with you doesn't mean...

An investigation into e-mails that seemed to have disappeared from the Bush White House has resulted in restoration of 22 million of the missing messages and a deal to uncover what could be millions of other e-mails that allegedly fell through cracks in the archiving system, two nonprofit groups said Monday. However, an untold number of official e-mails from President George W. Bush's era will probably never be recovered because it would be extremely costly to do so, lawyers involved in lawsuits brought by the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said. "While we have...

Swedish crime novelist Stieg Larsson left no will when he died five years ago, so everything passed to his father and brother. His companion of 30 years, whom he never married, got nothing. Reporting from Stockholm - Not even Stieg Larsson could've dreamed up "The Girl Who Fought for a Share of the Inheritance." But five years after his untimely death and millions of book sales later, the Swedish crime writer's estate is caught in a bitter feud worthy of one of his thrillers, complete with a strong-willed female protagonist, a murky bog of possible villains and a plot that...

What stopped Darwin discovering the laws of inheritance? Darwin devoted a large part of his life to understanding heredity. He wrote books on the subject. However, his views fluctuated with time, and historians have spent much time analysing the different ideas he entertained. "Darwin's conclusion from his studies on inheritance was always the same, that the rules and mechanisms of inheritance were complex and not ready for a definitive analysis." Darwin's conceptual model of evolution meant his experiments on inheritance were quite different from those of Mendel (source here)In a helpful analysis of the issues, Jonathan Howard of the University...

Darwinists Topple Darwin’s Tree of Life Darwin’s “Tree of Life” is a myth. It’s based on circular reasoning. It is a pattern imposed on the data, not a fact emerging from the evidence. We should give up the search for a single tree of life (TOL) as a record of the history of life on earth, because it is a “quixotic pursuit” unlikely to succeed – and the evidence is against it. Who said this? Not creationists, but a new member of the National Academy of Sciences in his inaugural paper for the academy’s Proceedings.1 W. Ford Doolittle and Eric...