Phony Spin On The Estate Tax
Bush wants to put our country further into DEBT!
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JoeUser Forums
JoeUser Forums
Posted on Mon, Jun. 05, 2006
The Editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer today debunks the Bush claim that the BIG BAD Estate( Death Tax as the GOP calls it) should be eliminated. Here is the truth about this tax according to the Inquirer:
The Tax is paid by 5 out of every 1,000 estates. That is ½ of 1% of the estates pay this HORRIBLE tax. We hear about all the family farms and businesses that have to pay this tax. In 2000 that was 123 Family Farms and 135 family-owned businesses. In other words, this tax does not impact 99.5% of Americans.
What would it mean to the Federal budget? In the ten years from 2012 - 2022 the Federal Budget would lose $1 Trillion dollars at a time when the National Debt is over $8.3 Trillion and heading for $10 Trillion by 2010. It is time for the Democrats to say NO and filibuster this irresponsible proposal by Bush and the conservatives in Congress!!!
Editorial | The Estate Tax
Death to the phony spin
The Republican-controlled Senate will attempt this week a feat that is breathtakingly irresponsible - abolishing the tax on multimillion-dollar estates.
Conservatives have done a masterful spin job in vilifying the estate tax. They've effectively renamed this progressive, needed source of revenue the "death tax."
It sounds so unfair to tax death. And a tax on death sounds as if it might snare everybody.
In truth, the estate tax is paid by only five of every 1,000 people who die.
Let's repeat that, so it can sink in and dislodge the misconceptions that a decade of false "death tax" rhetoric has planted in Americans' brains:
The estate tax is paid by only five of every 1,000 people who die.
This year, only estates of more than $2 million (or $4 million per couple) will owe the tax - about 12,600 estates total.
What's more, under current law, that exemption level already is set to rise to $3 million for an individual and $7.5 million for a couple by 2009. When that happens, this tax will be paid by only three out of 1,000 estates.
Next time you're sitting in a traffic jam on the Schuylkill Expressway or Route 42 in South Jersey, look ahead of you. Look left. Look right. Chances are, even without repeal, no one you see will have this tax levied on his estate after he dies.
Oh, but what about the sacred "family farm"? This is another falsehood promoted during the annual fights in Congress to provide another boon to the Paris Hiltons of the world: The estate tax is causing the extinction of the family farm.
Actually, the estate tax rarely hits family farms.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has found that, if the current $2 million exemption had been in place in 2000, only 123 family farms and 135 family-owned businesses nationwide would have owed the tax.
In 2009, only 65 farms across the country are projected to owe the tax. And the American Farm Bureau, in one news report, could not cite a single example of a family farm being sold to pay the estate tax.
The tax might mean fewer baubles for Paris and her set, but it is not forcing families to give up their hard-earned legacies.
Opponents of the estate tax also would like people to believe that this levy guts estates by taking half of their value. Not so. In 2003, the estates that were subject to the tax (including 1,183 in Pennsylvania) paid an effective tax rate, on average, of 19 percent. That's because if an estate is valued at $2.5 million, the heirs pay taxes on $500,000 - only the amount above the $2 million exemption.
Bill Gates Sr., father of the founder of Microsoft, says opponents of the estate tax are conjuring up a "mythical bogeyman."
"Wealthy people have been paying estate taxes, and we have been getting along just fine," the elder Gates said.
What the estate tax does do is provide a vital source of income for a federal government that is running up way too much debt on its charge card. If the tax were repealed, the Treasury would lose nearly $1 trillion in revenue over the first decade of its full effect, beginning in 2012. Already feeling the pinch of earlier tax cuts, the government is running annual deficits of more than $300 billion and beginning to trim funds for vital tasks like homeland security in large Northeastern cities and the rebuilding of Iraqi cities.
Repealing the estate tax would only increase the misguided determination of this Congress to cut useful programs that have already faced the chopping block - health care for the poor, student loans, mass transit, food stamps, child-care subsidies. That's an immoral trade-off.
You say you still don't trust how the government spends money? Fine, the estate tax also boosts the nonprofit sector, because it provides an incentive for rich people to make large charitable donations and set up foundations to do good works.
One GOP proposal would keep a tax rate of 15 percent on estates more than $5 million. But this plan would lose nearly as much revenue as a repeal.
The nation can't afford an estate-tax repeal. But the few estates that pay the tax can indeed afford it.
