bodhisattva wrote:
Gbaji the simple fact is that
a) The presidents heartfelt plea to end the death tax was based on a tale that never occurred (sound familiar)
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 Maybe I'm reading this wrong, and maybe you are but I thought that the "estate tax being repealed" was based on the issue of small businesses and their families facing financial problems as a result, but that this had *nothing* to do with Hurricane Katrina.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.
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b)There are a large number of checks and balances written into the tax to protect small business and family farms, these checks and balances are usually ignored by people decrying the 'death tax'.
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.
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c) you are a f[b][/b]ucking chob.
Nice to see that adhominum hasn't lost its appeal for you.