30% of millionares can breathe easier.Follow

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2005/12/08/house_spares_15m_from_alternative_minimum_tax/


The US House of Representatives passed a measure that would spare 15 million households from a $30 billion alternative minimum tax increase next year.

Only about 30 percent of people making more than $1 million would be affected, according to the Tax Policy Center, because most already pay at rates more than those of the alternative minimum tax

Man, someone really needs to take care of that other 70%.

Wait! But what if my estate magically becomes worth billions and billions of dollars right before I die? Then my kids would have to give some of that back to the government! In the .000043% chance that happens I had better make sure there are republicans up there to consider my possible interests, plus if I vote like the rich then that kind of makes me like them right?

That sounds awfully like believing in God =P

Hrm, I'm sure it's in Leviticus somewhere!

Repealing the estate tax goes against everything the Republicans preach about earning your fair share and entitlement. And they pawn their reasoning off on the public as "supporting the small businessman."

Eh? Cite? How exactly are you defining "more poor". Sure. They still got an inheritance, but with an estate tax, it's always going to be "less" of an inheritance. That may not be "more poor", but it's definately "less rich". Either way, it's taking money away from people because they saved it for their children instead of spending it for themselves. Which IMO is a really crappy reason to tax someone.

Ok. But that's not the same as saying that the estate tax never hurts anyone financially. You were trying to use that as an argument against the idea that estate taxes can hurt small businesses. But all that says is that it didn't adversely affect them due to hurricane Katrina. That's a far cry from trying to say that no one's finances are harmed by estate taxes...


That's like saying it's ok to pass a law allowing blind people to drive because we couldn't find anyone harmed by a blind driver in one state during a week long period of time.

Huh? Ok. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, and maybe you are but I thought that the "estate tax being repealed" was based on the issue of small businesses and their families facing financial problems as a result, but that this had *nothing* to do with Hurricane Katrina.

When Katrina hit, they stopped the repeal of the estate tax (reinstating it). Maybe to recoup costs. Maybe for other reasons. I've not researched this at all.

Some Republicans were looking for a reason to counter that one specific reversal of the repeal of estate taxes by looking for victims of Katrina who were adversely affected by the re-implementation of estate taxes (basically a double whammy where you'd just lost your parent and now couldn't afford to run the family business due to the taxes). The fact that they couldn't find any examples from Katrina alone says *nothing* about either the estate tax itself, or Bush's arguments in support of eliminating it.

You're mixing up two separate events in order to make it seem like something that didn't happen did.



Yes. But they're all "checks by exception". Which basically boils down to "if you happen to be in a business we like, we'll make an exception, but if not, you're screwed...".

Republicans (conservatives in general) dislike that sort of thing because it requires some sort of value judgement (and can be considered discriminatory). So if I earned my millions by carefully investing my stock options from my job into a valuable portfolio, I'm vulnerable to it all being taken away and that's ok. But if I earned my millions by owning a small store or farm, then I'm golden, right? Isn't that the government essentially making a broad and biased assumption that the social valud of a farm or store is greater then the social value of investment? How do they know I didn't invest in a company that produced a cure for a form of cancer?

Heck. My mother made a killing on the stock market. She worked for a company that *did* discover a cure for a form of cancer (actually, she made the discovery since it was a culture on one of the trays she worked up that showed the resistant cell growths, but it's the guy with the PhD that gets the credit). But her money is subject to a death tax when she dies, but if she'd owned a small business it wouldn't? That makes sense exactly how? What if she put that money into a small store or farm? Would that change things?

The "checks and balances" in the case of the estate tax are pretty darn arbitrary really. The people they most hurt are joe average citizen who happened to earn a good living during their lives, regardless of what they did to earn it. Sure. We make exceptions for some things we "like", but is that fair? I don't think so.



Nice to see that adhominum hasn't lost its appeal for you.

Heck. My mother made a killing on the stock market. She worked for a company that *did* discover a cure for a form of cancer (actually, she made the discovery since it was a culture on one of the trays she worked up that showed the resistant cell growths, but it's the guy with the PhD that gets the credit). But her money is subject to a death tax when she dies, but if she'd owned a small business it wouldn't?


Really, couple of years ago she was poor and you had to fight your way through home invasions and abject poverty.

Amazing how she morphs to fit the argument, isn't it?

Um... We *were* poor Smash. See. Some people can be poor when they are young, but then improve their status over time. I know this flies in the face of your Liberal assumptions that people are stuck with whatever lot they drew in life.

She struggled to earn her degree while raising 5 kids. She eventually got a job as a lab tech at a company called Idec. She ran a set of cultures using various treatments to try to find one that would fight a single form of cancer. One of her cultures showed an incredible resistance to the cancer. She worked with it and was able to duplicate it in second and third generation runs. That single culture in one tray eventually became the treatment mentioned in that article.

As a result, Idec stock flew through the roof. She had a number of options, excersized them and diversified her holdings. She's now comfortably retired on a nice piece of country property where she can raise cats and dogs (she raises and sells siamese cats and german shepards), and keep horses (cause she likes them). All of this happened years after we'd all moved on to our own lives and careers though, so it's not like that affected or changed how poor we were growing up.


I know. You want people to be either rich or poor, with no way to improve their lot in life. It makes it easier for you to convince poor people to give their freedom away in return for a better life (since they couldn't possibly obtain it on their own). You hate hearing stories like this because it utterly destroys your prime argument for social engineering.

Heh. And beyond that, the 5 children (my two brothers and two sisters)? All 5 are well off. All 5 own our own homes. All 5 are "successful" by every measure of such things (most married, lots of kids, happy, healthy, etc). But it's impossible to go from being poor to being upper middle class in a single generation, isn't it? Sheesh.

She could cure cancer, solve world hunger and hash out a unified field theory and it still wouldn't average out the karmic backslap she is gonna get for raising a complete douche of a son.

It's not about what I do, or anyone else does. The point is to show that arbitrarily deciding that wealth accumulated via the "making money with money" capital gains is somehow less valuable then doing it the "old fashioned way" by running a store or a farm is totally false. You can't say *why* a given person made money via investment. Sure. Maybe they made money by skimming off some sort of speculative investment scam that they managed to ride correctly (or made it ride the way they wanted). But many people (and interestingly enough the exact same demographic of "low end wealthy" that this topic is about) make it because they invest in companies and ventures that bear some dramatic fruit. It might be a company that develops a cancer cure. Or that builds a new computer interface that allows the deaf to communicate better. Or that builds new and better prosthetic legs for quadraplegics. Or maybe that just came up with a something cool that lots of people like.


The point is that you can't make a value judgement on that method alone. But you do. And many people do. That's the problem I have with this. It's the problem I have with people opposed to capital gains tax breaks. How many breakthroughs in technology have improved the lives of "the people" in the last 30 years or so? How many of those were developed on farms and in stores? None? Wait! Almost all of them were developed by those "evil" big corporations, which were enabled via those very capital gains investments. So none of that has "value"? We should punish people for investing in the businesses that bring us new medical treatments and medications, and new and better computer systems, and new and better communications systems, and such valueless things as CD players, CDroms, DVDs, anti-lock breaks, air bags, and probably hundreds of other things that likely would never have seen the light of day if someone wasn't willing to put money on the table and hope that something came out of it.

We punish those people, why? Answer me that...

You mean like bang asian chicks and goto muslim heaven?