Two U.S. Senators are sponsoring a bill to lower and in some cases, eliminate what they call the "Death Tax." That term alone should always tip you that you're being snookered because a tax on inheritances is not a tax on death and it's also not, as they also lie, an attempt to eliminate double-taxation. Most of the income at issue here has never been taxed even once, and the super-rich have mounted this campaign to try and keep it that way.
The lies — and make no mistake about it; these are lies — include appealing to the dreams of the non-wealthy; to tell them that if they did someday inherit great wealth, as per their fantasies, the evil Death Tax would swoop in and take it all away from them, leaving them as poor as they were before…or poorer. Ergo, to protect that dream, they'd better throw their support behind the elimination of that tax. But in fact, taxes on small inheritances have already been eliminated. This is just about the Rupert Murdochs of the world trying to make certain that much of their wealth is never taxed at all.
My father was, unhappily, an Internal Revenue Agent. It was unhappy for him because he hated the job and hated what he sometimes had to do in that job. He did it because he had a family and didn't know how else to earn money…and he took some pride/comfort in that fact that he was a lot nicer to people than some of his colleagues, and that he was able to make an unfair system a bit fairer. But I'll tell you what really made him mad.
You may remember the famous line from the very wealthy, very villainous Leona Helmsley. Caught cheating on her taxes, she was quoted by an associate as saying, "We [wealthy people] don't pay taxes…little people pay taxes." That attitude enraged my father, not because he liked taxes but because he figured that every buck the Helmsleys of the world didn't pay was a buck more that their gardener had to cough up. He had cases against a lot of very, very rich people who were outraged that they had to pay any tax at all. They understood that taxes were necessary and they were all for the poor and middle class paying them. They just felt that if they were rich enough, they were privileged…and one of those privileges ought to be passing the tax burden on to others.
The current move against the "Death Tax" would make those folks and Leona very happy. Editorials today in The New York Times and The Washington Post agree…and lately, those papers don't agree on much of anything.