| TAX BREAKS FOR THE BIGGEST DONORS?
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE FLAT TAX?
By Dana Milbank Opinion writer/Washington Post
Give credit to Republicans in Congress.
They've discovered, belatedly, that income inequality is a problem, and they're no longer proposing to give tax breaks to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.
Now they are proposing to give tax breaks to the wealthiest two-tenths of 1 percent of Americans.
On Tuesday afternoon, the House Rules Committee took up H.R. 1105, the "Death Tax Repeal Act of 2015," with plans to bring it to a vote on the chamber floor Wednesday â Tax Day. It is an extraordinarily candid expression of the majority's priorities: A tax cut costing the treasury $269 billion over a decade that would exclusively benefit individuals with wealth of more than $5.4 million and couples with wealth of more than $10.9 million.
That's a tax break for only the 5,500 wealthiest households in the country each year, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. Of those, the 318 wealthiest estates each year â those worth $50 million or more â would see an average windfall of $20 million each, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
And this at a time when the gap between rich and poor is already worse than it has been since the Great Depression? Never in the history of plutocracy has so much been given away to so few who need it so little.
This is the ultimate perversion of the tea party movement, which began as a populist revolt in 2009 but has since been hijacked by wealthy and corporate interests. The estate tax has been part of American law in some form since 1797, according to the advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness, a shield against the sort of permanent aristocracy our founders fought to rid themselves of.
It had long been a conservative ideal, and the essence of the American Dream, to believe that everybody should have an equal shot at success. But in their current bid to end the estate tax, Republicans could create a permanent elite of trust-fund babies.
The estate tax was a meaningful check on a permanent aristocracy as recently as 2001, when there were taxes on the portion of estates above $675,000; even then there were plenty of ways for the rich to shelter money for their heirs.
As the son of a schoolteacher and a cabinetmaker, I'd like to see the estate tax exemptions lowered â so that taxes encourage enterprise and entreÂpreÂneurÂship while keeping to a minimum the number of Americans born who will never have to work a day in their lives.
The current exemption of $5.4 million (the current estate tax has an effective rate averaging under 17 percent, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center) does little to prevent a permanent aristocracy from growing â and abolishing it entirely turns democracy into kleptocracy.
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