The estate tax and other red herrings

[Damuri_Ajashi]

I can’t believe that the administration is continuing their push to repeal the estate tax after failing twice this year. The tax impacts 2% of estates and prevents dynastic accumulations of wealth. For heavens sake if someone is leaving you more than 2 million dollars and you don’t think its fair to tax you on the amount OVER 2 million dollars then you probably need a lesson in perspective (this totally ignores the millions of dollars you can further shelter from the estate tax with competent estate planning).

I can’t believe that this administration is still trying to turn social security into a federal 401K plan. Here’s a good way to save social security, take the 300 billion dollars you spent on the war in Iraq and put it into the social security fund then force a cashing out of the IOUs from the social security fund and use the money to buy U.S. Treasuries. Am I the only one that remembers Bush trying to sell privitization as the cure to Social Security’s liquidity problems when in fact privatization would only have made the problem more severe and more imminent?

[UncleBeer]

How many of these threads did you want? I see this one has a totally different topic in its second paragraph. I need to respond to this:

Here’s a good way to save social security, take the 300 billion dollars you spent on the war in Iraq and put it into the social security fund then force a cashing out of the IOUs from the social security fund and use the money to buy U.S. Treasuries.

It is apparent that you don’t understand how Social Security is funded. What you propose is exactly the way it is done now. By law, every dollar in the Social Security Trust Fund is “invested” directly in the special Treasury Bonds created exclusively for the SSA Trust Fund. The IOUs are Treasury Bonds right now.