Ending Death Tax = More Humane Than Giving Unemployment Benefits

Unemployment is no longer the exclusive territory of the lazy, careless, or disinterested. Everyone knows this. The same can be said for the wretchedness of the estate tax; it affects lots of people. If not, then it soon will once the federal thieves reduce the death tax exemption from $3.5 million to $1 million. The tax rate will also increase from 45% to 55%.

Is this being discussed extensively by the mainstream media? No, not by my honest recollection. Perhaps it gets some coverage here and there, but not anywhere near the level of focus placed on the issue of unemployment insurance. As of right now, the welfare-statist/re-distributionist crowd is crowing very loudly for even more extensions on benefits, calling anyone who opposes that move draconian, scrooge, brutal, callous, and uncaring.

Those folks could be consistent enough with their position of helping the poor by providing relief if it was not for the fact that they are concurrently making new rules that would extract money from families. If they believe that providing stipends to the unfortunate is the only compassionate thing to do, then why do they appear so eager to burden more and more American families by confiscating thousands or millions of dollars when a family member dies? What bizarre form of compassion is this? No doubt, many struggling individuals would benefit greatly from the financial boost of an inheritance. Even if the individual on the deathbed may not be having a difficult time financially (hence, the million dollar nest egg), they may very likely have family members that are not doing so well. The law will not allow large transfers of money before death either without incurring a "gift" tax. Again, the severity of this estate tax is not to be under-estimated. This is not just skimming off the top. It is wiping out over half of one's wealth and wasting it on the federal government.

These are not legislative moves that help America's debt-ridden, perhaps paycheck-to-paycheck Americans move into economic security. Abolition of the right to inheritance is one of the Ten Planks of Marxism. We have not abolished yet (entirely), but certainly do not fully respect it.

I encourage anybody who has fallen for the propaganda of socialists championing the poor to think again about these policies. Everyone knows $1 million is not that much money in the big scheme of things (a decent house might be worth a quarter of that alone). Shoveling unemployed people a monthly stipend of a few hundred dollars does not make one magnanimous when it coincides a huge tax hike. Obama's crew promised no taxes. Only a fool who looks at tax policy solely through the narrow spectrum of the personal income tax would fall for Obama's proposition of not raising taxes. It's a cruel lie.

I'm not even going to get into the fact that taxing an inheritance so heavily reduces the the incentive to save money. Now I see why we need Social Security: because it is illegal to save (at least if you want to keep much of it).