A 65% Death Tax?
24th June 2010
Senators Bernie Sanders, Tom Harkin, and Sheldon Whitehouse will introduce what they are calling (George Orwell, call your office) the Responsible Estate Tax, with a rate of 55% on estates above $50 million, and a 10% surtax on top of that on the value of an estate above $500 million ($1 billion for couples), Paul Caron’s TaxProf blog reports. At least Mr. Sanders is intellectually honest enough openly to call himself a socialist, which is more than can be said for Messrs. Harkin and Whitehouse.
Most civilized countries don’t tax estates but rather tax the inheritances as if they were income, which makes far too much sense for the American tax code. (Of course, the reason they tax the estate rather than the heirs is because they get to take their bite off the top, where the rates are higher.)
It’s also funny how the word “greed” is so often applied to the billionaires, but not to the politicians who want to take 65% of the money the billionaires have accumulated even after a lifetime of paying annual income taxes.