By Gary Dickson
How many times have you heard, “There are only two things certain in life; death and taxes?” The older I get the more I believe it.
I have always paid my taxes without complaining ? too much, and the longer I live, the less concerned I am about dying.
The thing that bothers me about death and taxes, though, is how the government has wrapped them together and made a taxable event out of death. That just isn”t right.
The estate tax is something we can curse Eugene V. Debs and the Socialist Party of America for. It may have been Democratic President Woodrow Wilson who signed the bill that made it law in 1916, but it had been a major plank of the Socialist Party platform since 1904.
Rulers and governments have proved, throughout history, that a tax can be levied on just about anything. In 1696 King William of England decided to tax windows and in 1710 Czar Peter the Great of Russia imposed a beard tax. I suppose the time was ripe in the early part of the 20th century, because of the growing popularity of socialism, to tax the dead.
Personally, I don”t understand how any rational-thinking human being could view a tax on a dead person”s belongings as being OK.
Those in support of estate taxes will say that it really isn”t a tax on the dead; it is a tax on the living person who receives the benefit of the estate distribution. That is just semantics. It”s the dead person”s assets being taxed, no matter what anyone says.
What the proponents of the death tax really want is to take the riches from prosperous families because, they argue, the family members who would receive the estate didn”t earn it. They believe it is better to take a dead person”s property and give it to a group of people who had no connection to the individual while alive, and obviously didn”t earn the money, either.
The way I see it, the person who accumulated the estate paid all of the necessary taxes when the money was earned. It should solely be his or her decision as to who should receive the property at death. I am a firm believer that whatever we want to have happen with what we accumulate in life should happen, with no tax consequence whatsoever.
This year we actually have that freedom; at least on a federal basis. There was a repeal of the federal estate tax for 2010.
It sounds morbid, but people lucky enough to die this year will not have an estate tax levied against their belongings. As for me, I”m hoping to survive a few more years, so if Congress doesn”t act, the federal estate tax will revert to 2001 levels Jan. 1, which means the maximum tax percentage will be 55 percent. The tax on my estate will be less than that, but even the bare minimum is 18 percent and that is on estates of only $10,000 and less.
There have been thousands of cases in which family members have had to sell part or all of the family business, whether a retail store, manufacturing plant or farm/ranch, in order to pay the estate taxes.
The federal estate tax is a destroyer of multi-generational American businesses. If the costly estate tax returns next year, more businesses will close and additional jobs will be lost for the sake of just 1 to 2 percent of the total federal tax revenues collected annually.
It would be difficult to sum this matter up any better than a Jan. 4 Investor”s Business Daily editorial that stated, “People should not be punished because they work hard, become successful and want to pass on the fruits of their labor, or even their ancestors” labor, to their children. As has been said, families shouldn”t be required to visit the undertaker and the tax collector on the same day.”
Gary Dickson is the publisher of the Record-Bee. Call him at 263-5636, ext. 24. E-mail him at gdickson@record-bee.com.
