Re: Scoop? We Didn't Have Any Scoop!; by James Taranto

A study came out this week showing that the average inheritance in the U.S.
is something like $75,000. Estate tax has never been an issue for the
average American. And, given the special tax considerations afforded
retirements accounts, there are plenty of ways to avoid estate tax even with
what most would consider a fairly large estate.

Read the following editorial from the Baltimore Sun this week
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/bal-ed.estate08may08,0,161093.story?coll=bal-opinion-headlines

If you mistakenly believe that the federal estate tax forces lots of
families to sell off their farms and small businesses, you can pretty much
thank 18 of America's wealthiest families for that common but false myth.
We're talking about super-rich families whose wealth stems from not farms or
small businesses but from having founded Wal-Mart, Campbell Soup, Cox
newspapers, the Mars candy company, the Gallo winery and so on.

The report - by the independent nonprofit Public Citizen - says this
"stealth" campaign has inaccurately claimed that the estate tax destroys
family farms and businesses, that the tax costs more to collect than it
brings into federal coffers, and that it represents double taxation of
income (when most assets of the super-rich are unrealized capital gains that
have never been taxed, several studies show).

Under President Bush's 2001 tax cuts, the amounts exempted from the estate
tax are rising - to $3.5 million in 2009. In 2010, the tax is repealed for
one year. In 2011, it reverts to a $1 million exemption. We've previously
supported a permanent threshold at $3.5 million, a compromise suggested by
Democrats that would exempt 99.7 percent of all estates. Permanent repeal
proponents have failed so far in the Senate, but are expected to launch
another such bid this month.

Only a very tiny percentage of all estates - less than 2 percent in 2005,
when the exemption was at $1.5 million - pay the estate tax, according to a
Congressional Budget Office study last year. At that threshold, the study
found, only about 109 estates a year would involve farms and small
businesses with insufficient liquid assets to pay their estate taxes. With a
$3.5 million exemption, that drops to fewer than 50 such estates a year.

The United States has had an estate tax since 1916. It is a progressive tax
that falls on the wealthy. It encourages charitable gifts. Repealing it
would cost a trillion dollars over the decade starting in 2011, Public
Citizen says - more than enough to pay for, say, the estimated cost of the
first decade of the Medicare prescription drug benefit.

In a democracy, everyone should be free to debate and lobby for what he or
she wants. But when a relative few super-rich families use their wealth to
conduct a potentially effective, behind-the-scenes campaign to sway tax
law - under the ruse of helping farmers and small-business families- that
verges on oligarchy. Don't fall for it.


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