John Cassidy at Vanity Fair explains how Don Jr., Eric and Ivanka have 800,000,000 reasons to love the GOP Tax Plan.
“To be sure, Trump may have already taken precautions to avoid the estate tax, by, for example, setting up specialized family trusts. But if he lived another ten years and then left his heirs, say, two billion dollars of unsheltered assets, then, under the current system, they would face a federal tax bill of eight hundred million dollars. Under the Republican bill, that liability would disappear.
The tax affairs of very rich people are all differently arranged, of course. But in some ways Trump’s finances are fairly typical. He earns most of his income from businesses. He already exploits the tax system to the max. And he has benefitted enormously from the great asset-price boom of the past twenty years. On Thursday afternoon, he said the Republicans were giving the American people a “big, beautiful Christmas present.” For some reason, he didn’t explain that the biggest presents, by far, would be handed out to people like him.”
The estate tax is in place for a reason.
It’s purpose is to prevent the United States from devolving from a Republic peopled by free citizens into a feudal society in which citizens are chattel, as much the possession of landowners as the livestock, fields and outbuildings they tend and improve for the rich.
Thomas Paine, the founder who championed an estate tax in his Pamphlet Agrarian Justice wrote of real property... "the earth, in its natural uncultivated state... was (is) the common property of the human race"
This land was made for you and me.
Or, to put it more colorfully, in the words of an old British Union Song:
“They hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
Yet let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose”
While recognizing that wealth can be acquired through industry and skill it is also necessary to note, with legislation, that it can also be accumulated through war, criminal activity, graft and corruption.
Perpetuating great fortunes onto generations yet unborn through a system of taxation that does not recognize that each citizen owns, as a right of birth, some small part of the world he is born into will not lead to the security of those fortunes but rather, at some point, to remedies the rich would be wiser to avoid.
Another reason this tax bill should go down in flames.