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, problem solved. 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?
I can’t believe that this administration is paying for the most recent round of tax cuts with another tax cut (see unlimited ability to roll over regular IRAs into Roth IRAs) and noone is calling Bullsh*t.
I can’t believe that this adminsitration is resurrecting trickle down economic theory.
And yet, federal revenues are up - way up. Way up beyond even the rosiest of the Whitehouse’s own projections made when the tax cuts were implemented. Seems to me that it’s now 2-0 in favor of “trickle down” in the most recent two and a half decades.
I fail to understand why accumulations of wealth above a certain amount are a bad thing.
But tax receipts’ being up has no correlation with whether “trickle down” actually works. My understanding was that this was almost entirely due to the rich having gotten even richer. No trickle down necessary.
Wow. Even in the pit, that’s a pretty lame rebuttal. Why don’t you at least try explaining exactly why accumulation of wealth is a bad thing? Better yet why not try explaining why the process of someone dying is a good opportunity for the government to step in and siphon money from an estate? While you’re at it, explain why it should make a difference if the estate is $20.00 or $20,000,000.
I would love to hear the answers to these questions, as well. Owning a lot of money doesn’t mean the government has any more right to tax you unfairly than anyone else.
Despite my general disdain for our current CinC, I have to agree with Finagle (but not entirely with UncleBeer - receipts may be exceeding expectations, but spending has far exceeded the receipts).
On one hand, given the deficit, the government needs all the receipts it can get. On the other, the government is double dipping into the estate - assuming taxes were paid during the accumulation of the estate (and leaving off the availability of loopholes and dodges to the wealthy).
Money is changing hands. The government siphons off its cut when money changes hands. Explain why my getting paid for work I do is a good reason for the government to siphon off money. Explain why me having a good night at the tables in Vegas is a reason for the government to siphon off money. Explain why my parents giving me a gift is a reason for the government to siphon off money.
And to head off the inevitable “but that money has already been taxed once, and the estate tax taxes it again!” argument, let me remind you that every single tax applied post-income tax is taxing money twice: sales tax, property tax, gas tax, cigarette tax, etc… are all taxing money that has already been taxed. Plus I suspect that in a large estate some of the money was somehow invested pre-tax and has therefore not been taxed yet. So unless you support the government eliminating all secondary taxes, the “taxing the money twice” argument doesn’t do much to convince me.
Sure it does. Trickle-down, as applied to government revenues, says that lower tax rates will result, eventually, in higher revenues as the monies not appropriated by the government are put to other uses which generate a greater amount of taxable income.
Then you do actually agree entirely with UncleBeer. I’m on record here as being quite critical of the wasteful and profligate spending habits of our Republican-controlled legislature and executive.
Is it written somewhere that taxing the same money is some kind of horror? Is it a Scriptural thing? “Verily, thou shalt not tax the selfsame shekels, for this is an abomination unto the Lord. Just as verily, thou shalt not comfort thy rod with thy staff, for this is an impeachable…”
Why the hell not? You can tax the capital gains from inherited money that has been invested? What magical principle makes freshly inherited money sacrosanct?
Exactly why I proposed here a while back that the estate tax be done away with altogether and taxing the transfer as income to the recipient - like a windfall, or capital gains tax. An idea, it seems to me, that cuts right thru all the bullshit arguments.
It ain’t. Unless it’s more than $11,000 in a single year. In fact, your parents can each contribute $11,000/year to a trust fund for you. That money is exempt from taxes. http://www.irs.gov/publications/p950/ar02.html#d0e180
Leaving aside the obvious problem that they can’t turn back the clock, I have no idea what you mean by “force a cashing out of the IOU’s from the Social Security fund”. There are no IOU’s in the Social Security trust fund, only US Treasuries, which of course are an IOU from the remainder of the federal government.
The shortfall in Social Security is projected at about $3.7 trillion over the next 75 years, so even if they had invested all $300 billion, they’d still be about $3.4 trillion short.
And I believe the reason the distiction is important is because it can then be taxed at a different rate than if it were income tax, paid by the recipient.