From Time, we see that Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions is on a mission to find a wealthy victim of Hurricane Katrina to push for repeal of the federal estate tax. Apparently, the theory is that if they find a suitable victim whose estate would be taxed, then it might gather sympathy for their cause of elimination of the estate tax.
From the article…
So far, they haven’t found any rich corpses. But the fact that they look makes me sorry for what the GOP has become. Is it just me, or is this pitiful? I admit that I am hardly an unbiased observor, but what a terrible way to try to make your point.
I think it’s ghoulish and disgusting to be searching for a Katrina victim in order to use their death to further largely unrelated political goals. Especially given that Katrina had a disproportianate impact on the lower classes, and that repealing the estate tax would most immediately benefit the upper classes.
I love it - let’s find a rich guy who got killed in the hurricane and whose family stands to lose money on their inheritance because of the estate tax. We’ll feast on his corpse, I mean, we’ll build a media campaign around his unfortunate case, so we can get the estate tax repealed, so the government will have even less money, so we can do an even worse job of preparing for future calamities.
“Allan B. Hubbard (chief economic advisor to the President), dismissed the rebuilding effort’s impact on the longer-term effort to reduce the budget deficit. ‘This in no way will adversely impact his commitment to cut the deficit in half by 2009,’ he said.”
Hey, we may need that estate tax income if we’re going to cut the Federal deficit in half in three years.
“Let me tell you the sorrowful tale of Cuthbert L. Gooch. Cuthbert was a hard-working, self-made man who owned his own business. Cuthbert, sadly, was killed in Hurricane Katrina when his golf trophy was driven through his skull by the high winds. As if this story wasn’t sad enough, Cuthbert’s children will have to pay TAXES on their inheritance of Cuthbert’s estate! Isn’t the situation tragic enough, that we also have TAX them for having a father who heroically died in a national tragedy?”
As far as I know, they have yet to find one farm that had to be sold to pay the estate tax, and that is after 5 years of making the claim. Maybe they’ll get lucky, and find a farmer killed by Hurricane Katrina whose family had to sell the farm to pay the estate tax. Or maybe they’ll hit the trifecta and find a dead farmer whose children had to sell the farm to pay the estate tax who was killed during Hurricane Katrina by a flying environmentalist who opposed improving the levees of New Orleans.
Or maybe they’ll do what they did before, and just lie about it, given that the pig-fucker Rove remains in charge.
This is truly sad. It is just as ghoulish as any who are exploiting those deceased individuals who happen to be poor in order to make a political point. They are both wrong.
Yeah, because pointing out that the poor were left to their own devices with no mass transit to save their lives and that all the survivors trapped in NOLA were abandoned by FEMA for quite some time… that’s totally the same thing as looking for a corpse to use as a pawn to push through your legislation.
No…there are some valid points to be made about how the poor were treated. There were problems from the top down to the bottom (i.e., the survivors were abandoned by FEMA just as much as they were abandoned by the locals…they were just abandoned). But there are some on both sides who are using the victims to make a political point. I find that ghoulish.
At first glance the thread title seems to imply that the lawmakers were trying to show that the poor were left behind to face the storm, the looters, etc. “Did we find any rich people ravaged by this storm? No !!! The poor were the ones who had to face, etc.” Geez was I naive !!!
They are looking for wealthy corpses so they can show the “hardship” their families will incur because of that “awful” estate tax? Man that is sleazy. :mad:
No way. The pigs brought this shit on themselves by jumping into bed with the neo-conservatives. They don’t even seem to notice that their slop is getting more watered down and has way fewer corn cobs in it altogether.