In Which Minimum Wage Workers Contemplate Estate Planning
When you have waitresses in Arkansas worrying about having to pay an estate tax when they die, you know the right-wing disinformation campaign has gotten way out of hand.
Let me recap that in case you missed just how astounding it is. The corporate media has actually convinced waitresses in Arkansas who serve grits and ice tea for less than minimum wage plus whatever they can make in tips that if they somehow manage to scrape together some money to leave to their children that the government will tax it. And this is a tax that only comes into play for about the top 2 percent of estates.
As far as the argument about family farms, I really don't get it because that one seems simple to fix. As it is now, the IRS allows farmers to pay the tax in installments so they don't have to sell land to raise cash to pay the tax. That's a good idea. But wouldn't a better idea be to simply exempt up to a certain value of land for the estates of farmers in the first place?
Also, if I understand it correctly, money can be shielded from the estate tax through charitable foundations -- in other words, using that accumulated wealth to do some good in the world instead of keeping it locked up in the hands of the same wealthy families for generation after generation.
At some point, don't the children of ultra-wealthy parents have to learn to make their own contributions to society? There's nothing in the estate tax that prevents these children from accomplishing great things and building new fortunes through their own efforts. After all, America is full of stories of people who started with nothing and made great fortunes -- at least it used to be. That was before the modern institutional inequality that we all know and love came to pass.
Children from wealthy families already grow up with every advantage simply through the accident of having been born to ultra-wealthy parents. Do we really need to hand them a fortune on top of that?
Part of the reason the estate tax was put into place was concerns about what would happen to our democracy if too much wealth were to be concentrated in too few hands. Thanks in large part to the right-wing noise machine over the past 40 years, that concern has become more of a reality.
Let me recap that in case you missed just how astounding it is. The corporate media has actually convinced waitresses in Arkansas who serve grits and ice tea for less than minimum wage plus whatever they can make in tips that if they somehow manage to scrape together some money to leave to their children that the government will tax it. And this is a tax that only comes into play for about the top 2 percent of estates.
As far as the argument about family farms, I really don't get it because that one seems simple to fix. As it is now, the IRS allows farmers to pay the tax in installments so they don't have to sell land to raise cash to pay the tax. That's a good idea. But wouldn't a better idea be to simply exempt up to a certain value of land for the estates of farmers in the first place?
Also, if I understand it correctly, money can be shielded from the estate tax through charitable foundations -- in other words, using that accumulated wealth to do some good in the world instead of keeping it locked up in the hands of the same wealthy families for generation after generation.
At some point, don't the children of ultra-wealthy parents have to learn to make their own contributions to society? There's nothing in the estate tax that prevents these children from accomplishing great things and building new fortunes through their own efforts. After all, America is full of stories of people who started with nothing and made great fortunes -- at least it used to be. That was before the modern institutional inequality that we all know and love came to pass.
Children from wealthy families already grow up with every advantage simply through the accident of having been born to ultra-wealthy parents. Do we really need to hand them a fortune on top of that?
Part of the reason the estate tax was put into place was concerns about what would happen to our democracy if too much wealth were to be concentrated in too few hands. Thanks in large part to the right-wing noise machine over the past 40 years, that concern has become more of a reality.