Death And Taxes

Currently, the estate tax applies to leavings over about $11 million for a married couple, which represents significantly less than one percent of the populus. Not only that, as many people don't seem to understand, the tax, currently @ 40%, applies only to money above that amount. So the tax on an estate of about $11 million plus one dollar would be forty cents. In addition to which, there are loopholes aplenty, allowing many large estates to avoid taxes.

Despite those facts, the right wing screamers have managed to get Joe and Jane Sixbucks to be outraged that such a tax, cheerfully transmogrified into "the DEATH tax," exists. As if.

Today those America-loving Congressional Teabaggers voted to repeal the tax, giving a sop to the wealthiest of their contributers, and doing nothing for average Americans except to reduce funds available to pay for stuff that average Americans need, and about which the most wealthy don't need to give a shit. As long as there's a D in the White House (one assumes) it won't pass; but it makes clear, yet again, just where their priorities are. And why electing a Republican president would be a disaster for anyone and everyone not among those to whom the estate tax applies.

Senator Warren has some thoughts:

"I can't believe it," she said. "Well, yes, I can. This isn't just a really bad idea. This is an attack on our values -- getting rid of the estate tax in order to help a handful of really rich people, and telling our children that there's no money for them to go to school, to help them with their student loans, to build the necessary infrastructure so that they can get to and from the jobs that will help them pay off those loans...well, that's just...obscene."

And yet. And yet, they'll mangage to get the votes from the very people most adversely affected, by the usual techniques: Pretend Christianity is under attack, that white males are under attack, that ISIS is ready to come out from under our beds and impose Sharia law in kitchens around the land. It's embarrassing, is what it is: embarrassing that in what those very people like to call "the world's greatest democracy," voters are so easily bamboozled.

Which is the greater threat to our future? Straw men or budgets designed to enrich the already wealthy at the expense of everyone else? Seems pretty obvious, unless you watch Fox "news" every day, listen to Rush and Michael and Alex and Ann and Laura... In which case, yet again, you'll vote to retain the most regressive and cynical Congress in generations, and believe you're doing yourself and your country a favor. When the opposite, clearly as it can be, is true.

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