I was going to touch on the article I will have below on the open mic thread the other night. But I decided against it because I wanted the idea of the estate tax to be given its fair due in debate here at SUFA. For those that are unaware, if you are wealthy, and want to pass that wealth to your heirs, then you may want to ensure that you find a way to die during the year 2010 (Perhaps you could sign up for government health care!). Because for 2010, and 2010 only, the Estate tax has been suspended. As of January 1, 2010, a “temporary repeal” of the estate tax occurs. For all of 2010, there will be a 0% estate tax assessed. However, come January 1, 2011, the estate tax goes back into effect and the top rates of up to 55% will once again be assessed. Were we exceptionally wealthy, 2010 would be the year that Mrs. Weapon and I try every daredevil thing we have ever dreamed of attempting. After all, we don’t think the federal government has a right to what we have earned.
So the article that I read and was going to post the other night for Open Mic came from the Huffington Post. Chris Kelly wrote a fairly tasteless piece bemoaning the fact that Casey Johnson, heir to the Johnson and Johnson fortune, passed away in 2010 instead of 2009 or 2011. First, I say tasteless because Kelly wrote the article only a couple of days after her death. Very tasteless when you have friends and family of Johnson still shocked and saddened at her sudden passing. Just another example of a media dick doing what media dicks do. Kicking people when they are down. Hurting grieving family members in order to attempt to make a political point. The article was tasteless at any point, but doing so so shortly after her death was even lower than the already low bar I expect from the far left media.
I will simply allow you to read Kelly’s disgusting piece:
A Horrible Thing to Think About Casey Johnson
This may shock you, if you think you live in a free country that respects private property and honors honest work, but if Casey Johnson had died last week, her fiancée, the future Mrs. Tequila — Johnson, would have had to pay onerous confiscatory taxes on her hard-earned inheritance. Well, not the first $3.5 million. But after that.
Why even bother being born rich, or marrying money if the government’s just going to take it?
Luckily, America’s inheritance tax disappeared at midnight, New Years Eve. Some congressmen tried to extend it, but they couldn’t get the votes. Let me rephrase that. Your Congress couldn’t muster the nuts to not repeal a tax on the super-wealthy that had existed in its present form since 1934. Let me rephrase that again. Two and a half million Americans will die this year. Fewer than six thousand will leave estates worth more than $3.5 million. Had any of these multimillionaires died between The Great Depression and last Thursday, their heirs would have been taxed. Now they won’t.
A Democratic Congress in a time of war just cut a tax on the richest of the rich to zero.
The Estate Tax was created to pay for wars and emergencies. America’s first estate tax was levied to build a navy in 1797. It was temporary. It came back in 1862 to pay for the Civil War, went away again and came back to pay for the war with Spain. FDR brought the tax back again, during the Depression. America is in a recession now, and two wars that have lasted longer than the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined. And the Estate Tax just went down to zero.
Read the Rest of the Article at The Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-kelly/a-horrible-thing-to-think_b_411373.html
Now, I understand that Casey Johnson and Tela Tequila are easy targets for the far left media. No one outside of the family will mourn Johnson. She had drug troubles, was obviously troubled, and her life was anything but normal. She is a poster child for the troubled little rich girl. And Tequila is, and I say this as nicely as I can…. weird. The bi-sexual reality star (with zero talent outside of choosing outrageously revealing outfits) was apparently “engaged” to Johnson. Because of their living outside of the societal norms, it appears that they are open targets for the type of hate-filled writing that Kelly has done here. Whining about the federal government’s loss of money instead of having a little respect for a young woman that had lost her way and who’s life ended when most of us are just beginning to understand what living really is. Kelly called it a “horrible thing to think,” but apparently not horrible enough for him to not write it out and publish it to millions of readers in order to score political points with his far left pals.
Let me say up front that I strongly oppose the estate tax. And I do so for a plethora of reasons, the most important of which is that it goes against every thread of morality that I have. If I haven’t made it clear in the past, I believe in individual liberty and personal freedom. I despise the concept of “the greater good” because such a thing simply does not exist. And I do not believe in the idea that somehow the federal government is entitled to take what is mine, for no reason at all, and simply redistribute it to those who did not earn it.
What exactly has the federal government done that makes the estate tax a moral entity? Did the deceased gain some service that is being paid for? I think not. After all, the deceased was extremely wealthy, which means they were already paying an outrageous sum of income tax based on the faulty progressive income tax structure. All those income tax collections, which were disproportionately stolen from the wealthy, certainly paid more than their fair share for national defense, and all the other hoo ha the government claims to provide. They already paid capital gains taxes on money earned on investments because we can’t have someone make a dime that Uncle Sam doesn’t profit from. So at the time of their death, they have already paid for everything that the federal government provided for them (and for 9 others since the top 5% pay 90% of income taxes).
It seems to me that the argument that I hear most often from those in favor of the estate tax is that it is simply unfair that the children of the wealthy, who did not earn the money themselves, get a silver spoon. The claim is why should that child, the genetic lottery winner, be allowed to benefit from the efforts of their parents? I have to be honest and say this is the most ridiculous argument that I have heard for the estate tax. Let’s assume that I am the wealthy one and I ma leaving Weapon Jr. a billion dollars. I earned that billion. It was my hard work. It was my risk taking. It was my hours and hours away from my family building my wildly successful business. That money is mine. During my life I am free to dispose of it how I please, because it is mine. I can give it to the church or spend twenty straight years gambling and keeping a harem of Brazilian hookers.
Yet somehow, proponents of the estate tax believe that as I speed towards death (no doubt hastened by the Brazilian hookers), that I somehow LOSE the right to determine what is done with my money. That I somehow no longer have the right to determine what happens to the money that I earned. That for some reason, the government should get half of my money upon my death, despite the fact that they took zero risk, worked not a single long night, did absolutely nothing to earn that money. At least Weapon Jr. sacrificed time with me to earn it. The federal government did NOTHING to earn it. They just stake a claim as though it was theirs all along, and I was just borrowing it.
And that is the argument that I hear. That my own child has no moral right to benefit from my hard work, but the federal government DOES have the moral right to benefit from my hard work. How exactly does that make sense to any clear thinking individual? I simply cannot, unless of course they suffer from that fatal flaw we discuss here…….. Contradiction. To think that one person who didn’t earn the money has no moral right to it but that another who didn’t earn the money has moral right to it is a very large contradiction. I say that No one has a RIGHT to the fruits of my labor except me. And NO ONE should have the right to determine where a single cent of my money goes after my death than me. Period.
Because that is what it means to be free. That is what individual liberty is about. To make decisions about what is mine free of the tyranny of some political cause. I don’t want my money going into the public coffers and funding things that I am diametrically opposed to. I don’t want to contribute a half a billion dollars to funding wars, passing out welfare, or paying the paychecks of the 535 fracking idiots that populate Congress. I would rather Weapon Jr. use it to start a new business venture, build a church, or have a harem of Brazilian hookers of his own. It’s my money, I should be the one who decides where it goes. There is no moral argument that can be made against me having the ability to decide where the fruits of my labor go. None.
And I will not accept the argument either that the permanent elimination of the estate tax will somehow cost the federal government trillions of dollars. I hear that argument a lot as well. Estimates that it would take 1.2 Trillion from federal coffers over the next ten years. Well boo hoo. I don’t care. The federal government should adjust their spending to match their income. Lose a source of income, and you cut your expenditures. So I HOPE that it gets repealed permanently and it takes that much money from the federal government. That is a personal dream. Because perhaps the only way that this government will ever get back in line with personal liberty is for these types of things to be done.
Because I believe that there are only two ways that the federal government is going to pare down and actually allow for individual liberty and personal freedom. Option 1 is for the federal government to go bankrupt. Upon realizing that they have no money, they will be forced to repeal thousands of crooked laws that provide things they should not be providing in the first place. Option 2 is that as government continues to increase its scope and size, it continues to have to increase what it takes from its citizens in order to provide its crap. As a result of continually increasing tax burdens, Americans reach their breaking point and violently revolt. I abhor option 2, but if it happens I am hoping it begins at the front gate of Pelosi’s mansion.
The bottom line is that the estate tax was created by a progressive President who was pushing America to dependency. In order to do so, he needed more money coming in, and this was another way to do it. The estate tax was immoral from its inception. And its constant increases and additions have further bastardized American principles. It should be repealed permanently and those who oppose repeal so fervently are then free to “donate” 50% of their estate to the federal government should they believe that it actually serves the “public good”. But I have a feeling that those politicians who so fervently believe in the righteousness of the estate tax would not leave a single dime to the federal government. They wouldn’t be pushing to keep the tax so hard if they didn’t already have a loophole that will allow them to skirt the tax. You can bet on that.
As for me personally, I can assure you that I will endeavor to ensure that no matter how much money I ever make, I will spend that much before I die. If I play my cards right, the last $5,000 in my bank account will pay for the casket and burial plot. And they can put on the headstone:
Eff you Uncle Sam. It was mine and I spent it. Rather than give it to you I contributed it to the Brazilian economy. Go fire Pelosi to make up for the shortfall.
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