In a recent Salon.Com article, Steve Bodow is aghast that in a Gallup poll 60 percent of Americans favored abolishing the federal estate tax (No relief). Only a vast right wing misinformation campaign could be responsible for such misguided views on the part of the American public. After all, the poor and middle class should hate the rich, not want to hand them an $850 billion gift (Bodow’s term for the tax cut).
Why don’t people hate the rich anymore?
Part of the problem is that in many ways the average American is rich him or herself by historical standards. In the lead-in to his anti-wealth diatribe, Bodow claims that the Congress wants to restore American to “pre-abolition America — where the rich were rich and the poor were chattel…” Of course by the economic standards of the 1850s, my neighbors who subsist on welfare are unbelievably well off. Rather than envy or hate prosperity, almost all Americans are the beneficiaries of unimagined levels of personal wealth and income levels.
Second, thanks to the mass media and our own expanded interactions with people, Americans have connections with the rich and an understanding of how they got rich that previous generations didn’t. Bodow blasts the Heritage Foundation for claiming the estate tax will rob minority businessmen, while in truth according to Bodow it affects largely white men. Fine, but when he dies does Michael Jordan really deserve to have half of his estate confiscated by the state simply because he was wildly successful and entertained billions of people? Do Bill Gates or Steve Jobs deserve to have half their estate confiscated because they revolutionized the personal computer industry?
On a smaller scale, I’ve met and talked with many people starting their own businesses who are working their butts off putting 60 to 70 hour weeks in to get off the ground. Some of them will fail, others will be wildly successful. What sort of screwy tax system reserves a special confiscatory tax only for the wildly successful of the bunch? Maybe to folks like Bodow this makes sense, but to a lot of Americans this seems downright bizarre.
It’s even more bizarre, of course, to take that money and then give it to the federal government. This is almost worse than just taking the assets and burning them. I assume, for example, that Michael Jordan will probably want to leave assets for his children and family as well as putting a lot of his money into non-profit foundations. That makes a lot more sense than giving it to the U.S. government so they can buy attack helicopters to help death squads in Colombia or for creating a worldwide eavesdropping network such as Echelon (or just the run-of-the-mill pork barrel projects that tax money gets wasted on).
The wealthy, like the rest of us, have already paid ridiculously high income and other assorted taxes throughout their lives. Making the most successful Americans cough up half their estates when they die in order to feed government coffers is an idea so profoundly stupid that people hardly need right wing think tanks to tell them it’s a bad idea.