Email on estate tax repeal

My post from last week on the House vote to repeal the estate tax last generated some interesting responses from a few regular readers, but there’s one I wanted to share.

A longtime Carpetbagger friend, whom I fondly call Dr. Who, emailed to say that he agreed with my concerns in part, and disagreed in part.

Dr. Who’s position, in a nutshell, is that it’s okay to tax the estates of the superrich because their estates are so large that their heirs will still have plenty of money. He disagrees, however, with leaving the estate tax threshold in place — currently at $1 million for individuals, $2 million for couples.

“I agree with Roosevelt’s statement that the tax should ‘be aimed merely at the inheritance or transmission in their entirety of those fortunes swollen beyond all healthy limits,'” Dr. Who said in his email. “But I think that a healthy limit is probably somewhere over $3 million.”

Well, Dr. Who, have I got a political party for you.

It turns out that there’s a small, rebellious group of Americans who want to do exactly what Dr. Who recommends. The estate tax will be kept in place, under their plan, but the exemption would be raised, effective next year, to $3 million for each individual and $6 million for married couples. If implemented, this policy would exempt 99.65% of all estates in the country.

Who are these brave, wise Americans who champion Dr. Who’s suggestion? Congressional Democrats, who offered this proposal as an alternative to the Republicans’ complete repeal of the tax. The House voted 239-188 to reject the Dems’ plan.

One more thing on this topic, the Democratic alternative would have cost a lot less than the GOP’s repeal of the estate tax, but Dems were nevertheless careful to offset its cost so as to not add to the already record-high budget deficit. The Republican plan, meanwhile, made no effort to pay for this latest tax break for millionaires and billionaires. Not one penny of this is being paid for, so the entire cost of the estate tax repeal gets added immediately to the national debt. Gotta love that fiscal responsibility.