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But Paris gets an extra Bentley

Washington Monthly, May, 2005 by Charles Peters

Last month, the House voted to end the estate tax. This has to be one of the greatest propaganda triumphs of the Bush administration. And that's saying something because the boys have done pretty well in this area. When the administration came to power in 2001, only 49,911 decedents had estates large enough to be affected by the tax. That was only 2.1 percent of all the people who died that year. Yet by calling the tax a "Death Tax," and selling the public on the idea that it was unfair to tax them for dying, the Republicans seem likely to succeed in eliminating a valuable source of revenue, one that was notable for hitting only those who could afford it. In 2001, the average estate taxed was worth $2.7 million.

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Now, the Democrats seem to think that their best hope is to limit the tax to estates worth $35 million or more. We're not talking here about the estates of the family farmer or the small businessman that proponents of estate tax abolition say they worry about. Yet the Republicans refuse to settle for even the $35 million figure, which has been proposed by Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.). They demand total repeal of the tax. This, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, will cost the Treasury, meaning all of us, $290 billion by 2015.

But Paris gets an extra Bentley

Washington Monthly, May, 2005 by Charles Peters

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