Here's what the Wall Street Journal says this morning:
We'll take pro-growth victories wherever we can find them these days, and last week saw a small one in the U.S. Senate, of all places. The Members voted 51-48 to cut permanently the death tax rate to 35% and exempt all estates of less than $10 million per couple ($5 million for a single taxpayer) from any tax. President Obama wants a 45% rate with only a $7 million exemption.
Every Republican voted for the lower rate, and so did 10 Democrats. This is the closest thing to bipartisanship we've seen so far this year on Capitol Hill, but naturally the White House and most of the media are appalled. Their idea of bipartisanship is when three Republicans cross party lines to pass $780 billion in "stimulus" spending.
Perhaps this explains why Majority Leader Harry Reid blew a gasket during the floor debate, calling the death-tax amendment by Jon Kyl (R., Ariz.) and Blanche Lincoln (D., Ark.) "outrageous," a "stunning act of hypocrisy," and a tax cut for those "at the very top of the food chain."
Then he actually said: "We can only turn the page from recession to recovery if we watch every single taxpayer dollar the way families watch every dollar in their budget." We'd say Mr. Reid was being deliberately ironic, but Harry doesn't do irony. He's an outrage man. And speaking of which, he was at that very moment working to pass a 2010 budget outline that includes record spending and trillions of dollars in new debt.
There's a lot wrong with the so-called "death tax." For starters, it's taxing assets that have been taxed already. Secondly, many farms and businesses are worth more that $10 million--the death tax forces many to sell off those operations.
Small businesses, as we hear almost daily, are the driving force of our economy.
There should be no death tax.
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The reason our tax code is so cumbersome is because of exemptions like the death tax.
ReplyDeleteIncome is income.
If My employer transfers money from himself to me, I have to pay taxes on it.
So why shouldn't I have to pay taxes if I pass money on to my children. It's income to them, is it not?
I own a family business and we employ our daughter. Should I be allowed to contribute tax free to her inheritance instead of payrolling her?
Listen. If we are going to want a strong military, medicare and all the other goodies that the government provides we are going to have to pay for it.
Borrowing money from the Chinese isn't the way to finance our country.
Sure, I would love to reduce my taxes. But with our 12 trillion dollar debt perhaps we should start thinking of ways to pay it off instead of ways to duck it.
After all, the Chinese aren't going to let us out of our obligations to repay the debt