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Sunday, July 10, 2005
The truth about taxes
Remember the Bush administration line in their campaign to repeal the estate tax where they talked about family farms being sold to pay the evil "death tax?" Well, unsurprisingly, like most of what we have heard from W, it was a lode of crap. It turns out, according to an article in today's NYT, that only a handful of farm estates are even subject to the tax:All but 27 farmers left enough liquid assets to pay taxes owed, the budget office found, although it hinted that the actual number might be zero. The study examined how much in cash, stocks and bonds these farmers left to pay estate taxes, but the report noted that no data existed on how much life insurance the farmers had put into trusts. Virtually all wealthy farmers own life insurance in trusts, say estate tax lawyers who specialize in working with farmers.
So let's take a look at the three taxes that most people think about; income tax, social security tax, and (thanks to relentless propaganda by W) the estate tax. The estate tax is only paid by the top few wealthiest estates, income tax is slightly progressive with rates going up as income goes up, and social security tax is regressive with the tax starting on the first dollar of income and ending somewhere around $80,000.00 these days. Take a guess, which has W tried to repeal, which he has tried to make less onerous on high income earners, and which he has done absolutely nothing to reduce?
There are thousands of lower and middle class Americans who have been convinced that the only thing keeping them from getting ahead is that they have to pay taxes. They almost all voted for Bush and he has done nothing at all about the taxes they actually pay.
Update: Whoops, I really should read the blog every few hours (and so should you) to see when something new has been posted. Hammer had this story a good 12 hours ago.
