The Wrong Kind of Concern
Conservatives have been making noise about how income inequality is bad and that is so important to them:
Appearing at a candidate forum in late January, three likely Republican presidential contenders — Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul — all made a striking confession: They considered “the increasing gap between rich and poor” to be a problem.
Yeah, the problem they see is that income inequality is being noticed more and it’s in danger of being opposed. We can’t have that.
Which is not too far from their stances: they brought it up primarily to say that it can’t be addressed with government action—in short, we should not raise taxes on the rich or mandate minimum wage hikes, stuff like that.
To prove their extreme concern over income inequality being challenged, Republicans in the House just passed (on heavily partisan lines) a bill that would repeal the estate tax.
To be clear, the estate tax does not affect you unless you are handing over more than $5.43 million upon your demise, and that’s only if you’re single. For a married couple, it’s $10.86 million. And that means that if parents pass away with a $15 million estate, no tax is applied until the first dollar after $10.86 million. After that, the rates go from 18% to 40%, the 40% kicking in after $1 million. So on the $15 million estate, the inheritors would pay about $2 million in taxes.
So, how is this about Republicans protecting people of lower incomes?
Republican Majority Whip Steve Scalise explained, “the vast majority of our members in the Republican conference have never had the opportunity to stand up for small businesses who are threatened by the death tax everyday.”
Ah, yes. The small business owner. The Republicans’ favorite go-to prop when they want to help the super-wealthy.
But wait! Those small businessmen could get hit! Really! It happens!
Well, in 2014, the average and median small business sold for about $185,000.
In fact, only about 20 “small” businesses and farms each year are subject to any estate tax every year. And that’s figuring businesses which value at $5 million, not $10 million. And those 20 per year usually owe only about 5% in taxes.
Not to mention that there is no language in the bill whatsoever mentioning small businesses, just an unqualified repeal.
So, are Republicans really voting to protect small businesses? Of course not. It’s an asinine lie. Nothing new—I have written before about how Republicans habitually trot out “small businessmen” when they want to give massive tax cuts to primarily wealthy people.
In short, it’s pure, unadulterated bullshit.
The estate tax repeal would cost the federal government about $27 billion per year, mostly so that people with hundreds of millions, as well as billions of dollars can maintain vast treasuries of unearned wealth.
For example, Emma and Georgina Bloomberg stand to inherit their father’s $31 billion fortune. Assuming they get it all (and are not largely cut out like Paris Hilton), and they split the fortune evenly, each would, after the estate tax, only receive $9.3 billion. The horror!
As Thomas Piketty pointed out, it is amassed wealth that is the biggest problem in the world—and the estate tax is pretty much the only established tax on that wealth.
And so naturally, Republicans, newly concerned about income inequality, want to completely erase that tax, to the exclusive benefit of the 1%.
Sounds legit.
Of course, we can breathe a sigh of relief: the bill will never become law. Democrats stand to filibuster it in the Senate, and even if not, Obama will veto it. And Republicans know this. Despite that, they passed it purely as a stunt—which, strangely, kind of puts the lie to their recent claims of concern for income inequality. (Alas, billionaires like Sheldon Adelson can hire lawyers to set up massive trusts to get around billions in estate taxes.)
It’s almost as if they figure that independents know full well they are lying all the time, or they believe independent voters are idiots who won’t notice.
As Thomas Piketty pointed out, it is amassed wealth that is the biggest problem in the world—and the estate tax is pretty much the only established tax on that wealth.
Piketty was a start, but he didn’t actually get very deep in his analysis.
Bill Gates having $80B or the Walmart heirs having $40B each doesn’t negatively affect me in the slightest.
Granted, Gates amassed his wealth by eliminating inferior competition in the personal computer space, and Walmart got to its position by running out less efficient retailers across the nation.
This effects employment but also came with consumer savings — let’s not forget that Microsoft’s offerings were always cheaper than Macs back in the day!
Taxing capital wealth may be a blunt-force way of redressing the ‘great crimes’ behind most if not all great fortunes, but in actuality will not permanently fix the problem, since the root issue is operating at a different level and sector of the economy.
The biggest tax the middle class faces — here in the US, Japan, and even the social paradises of the nordic states — is the ever-rising cost of living in housing.
This is obvious — but it is so obvious, and omnipresent, that we generally ignore it, like fish acclimate to ignoring the water they’re in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI
Housing costs in Japan are still way, way off the chart, even after 25 years of deflation
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/QJPR628BIS
But at least Japan’s population is basically crashing now:
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/LFWA24TTJPM647S
shows how new entries into the housing market are down over 1/3 from the 1990s, this should result in continued downward price pressures on housing.
But in the US there’s no such salvation — population is going to continue increasing throughout the century.
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CUSR0000SEHA
shows how rents have risen 10% already since the recession — and TONS more in actual viable areas with access to jobs.
Redistribution can’t fix this. We need actual housing policy! Tons more supply, at all levels of the demand curve.
And we need to up the taxes on land use, to encourage the market to utilize land more efficiently.
But yeah, Republicans here at full of it. Film at 11. The stupid thing is that it’s their policies that are screwing things up more than anything.
This is a very silly, and stupid, nation.