More Debt For Mikey

I detected the smell of rotten eggs around our house and thought Mischief Night came a bit late. When I saw that our cars and the outside of our house had not been pummeled with them, I realized almost immediately that we’d received another campaign mailer from Mike Fitzpatrick, and that was the source of the stench.

In this latest piece of propaganda, the front shows a man in his 50s in something that is supposed to approximate the garb of an auto mechanic near a vehicle with its front hood up (with the name “Walt” on the uniform, and he’s white of course, though the uniform is WAY too clean), and the wording says, “He makes $75,000 per year. But when his family inherits his business, they’ll be taxed like millionaires.”

When you flip the mailer over, it shows a pink piggy bank with a $50 bill sticking out of it next to these words:

“It’s Called The Death Tax. And Mike Fitzpatrick Wants To End It.”

And Mikey’s picture appears next to the words, of course.

Well, as many of us know (and as I made clear to the Fitzpatrick office staffer I called on this yesterday), it’s not called the “death tax.” Its proper name is the “estate tax.” And the top rate of the tax has been shrinking steadily over the last few years.

I realize the aggrieved cry of the Repugs against this has been part of their boilerplate on behalf of the investor class for some time, so let’s say that we inject some reality into this and try to “drive a stake through its heart” once and for all, OK?

This link takes you to a factcheck.org article that points out the following (and I’m sure “Walt” is in the same income bracket as the farmers discussed here):

Contrary to (the claim of the ad in question) that "your family" might be crippled, the vast majority of families actually are not affected by the estate tax. In fact, less than 3 percent of deceased adults in 2002 had estates subject to the tax, according to the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and figures from the IRS.

And though the ad focuses on family farms and businesses, the truth is that very few actually pay the estate tax. The Tax Policy Center projects that roughly 440 taxable estates were primarily made up of farm and business assets in 2004.

And as noted in this article from The Nation:

Lost in this debate are the benefits to our country of maintaining an estate tax. Originally passed in 1916, the estate tax was a fundamentally American response to the excesses of the Gilded Age. Populist reformers labored for the three decades before 1916 to pass federal income and estate taxes in order to shift the tax burden, mostly in the form of nineteenth-century tariff duties and excise taxes, off of Midwestern and Southern farm states and onto the wealthy Northeastern states. But underlying the movement for an estate tax was a recognition that too much concentrated wealth and power was putting our democracy at risk. We had fought a revolution to reject hereditary political and economic power--and the dizzying inequalities of the Gilded Age violated a fundamental American ideal of equality of opportunity.

We are now in a second Gilded Age. Instead of taking steps that would strengthen our democracy, we're heading backward to the wealth inequalities of a century ago. We need to preserve the estate tax in states and at the federal level for exactly the reason it is under assault. In a democracy, we should be offended when the power of concentrated wealth brazenly attempts to shape the terms of policy debate and dictate the rules of our society.

Also, as Molly Ivins notes here…

If Bush does manage to make the tax cuts permanent, it will add more than $3 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years. The federal budget would be virtually in balance if there had been no tax cuts (including the estate tax reduction).

Also, this takes you to a wealth of information concerning “perception vs. reality” in this entire debate.

Finally, I want to leave you with this quote from editorial writer Douglas Pike of the Philadelphia Inquirer regarding Mikey (appearing from this link):

Unfortunately, embattled Republicans are more likely to show their "independence" not by echoing (Delaware U.S. House Representative Mike) Castle's calls for fiscal sanity, but by peddling greater fiscal irresponsibility. Consider Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick of Bucks County, who has voted against the party line about one-third of the time in his first term. He is an enthusiastic supporter of the GOP's deficit-financed tax cuts, but he has opposed saving money in hot-button areas such as education, Medicare and closing military bases. Apparently, he thinks that Bush isn't raising the $8.5 trillion national debt fast enough.

Good job, Doug – I hope you weren’t responsible for Mikey’s endorsement (I'd rethink some of those areas of "cost savings," though).