Kay Bailey Hutchison: Class Warrior
From the Carpetbagger Report:
Last night featured all of the predictable rhetoric and arguments, but my nominee for the dumbest comment of the debate comes by way of Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas): "[W]e are turning our back on the middle-class and poor people in this country who depend on the minimum wage and death-tax relief."
Right. That would be all the desperately poor millionaire heiresses yearning to breath free.
Just one more reason to love Barbara Ann.
Labels: Class Warfare, taxes
posted by The Local Crank | 2:42 PM
2 Comments:
I have to admit, I'm not a fan of the estate tax. When my last grandparent died in the mid-90's, her estate turned out to be surprisingly large because she had lived in the same modest house for about 40 years, she and her husband had lived frugally all their lives, and they had saved the majority of their disposable income as if expecting another depression. In the end her last wish was that her son and all her grandchildren split the money. Because the estate was over $600,000 (a number that had been set decades earlier and not adjusted for inflation), the government got 50% of that and her family got the rest. Now, I never expected any money and was surprised as hell (and very thankful) to get what I got, but it always bugged me that the government was taking a huge chunk of money they had already taxed as income during my grandparents' lives and that people routinely defend the estate tax as something that "only affects the rich." Clearly that was not true in my grandmother's case. That same year, when Jacqueline Onassis died, how much do you think the government got from the millions she left her children? The answer: $0. Like most truly wealthy people, she could afford a small army of accountants and lawyers to shield the money through trusts and foundations and the like.
I'm not necessarily opposed to the existence of an estate tax, but as with most taxes designed to make the rich "pay their fair share," it usually ends up affecting people further down the income scale.
There are some legitimate gripes to be made about the estate tax, and snaring the relatively small estates of frugal families is one of them. Now, though, the first (I believe) $2million is exempted, without a phalanx of lawyers and accountants. The Republican proposal would have, literally, affected something like a grand total of 2,700 families in a country of 300 million.
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