By Daniel Gross
Slate.com
Posted Wednesday, July 21, 2010
So, a Treasury secretary, a labor union leader, a hedge-fund billionaire, and an heiress walk into a conference call.
It's not a Catskills joke. It was the teleconference staged Wednesday morning by United for a Fair Economy's Responsible Wealth Project to discuss the need to reinstate the estate tax. The situation surrounding the estate tax is truly bizarre. The excellent book Death by a Thousand Cuts, by Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro, describes how a tax that falls on the slimmest minority of Americans was set on the path to extinction in 2001. Legislation called for the tax to decline to the point at which it disappears entirely in 2010. Then it would bounce back to its pre-2001 level in 2011. The Republican advocates of the legislation assumed that Congress would act in the interim to permanently abolish the tax. But they didn't, in large measure because—shocker!— Republicans in 2009 refused to cooperate on a compromise. And so 2010 is turning into an excellent time for rich people to die. Sens. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., are working on a proposal to reduce estate taxes going forward. (They are an odd pair: The number of Arkansans subject to the estate tax each year could fit into the master bathroom of a Greenwich, Conn., mansion, and Kyl is one of those foolish deficit faux-hawks who can't abide increases in debt but is happy to push legislation that would increase the deficit by a few hundred billion dollars.)
The purpose of the press conference was to show that abolishing the estate tax massively increases the deficit in order to help a few very wealthy people. Former Treasury secretary and former Citi chairman Robert Rubin opened the call, playing the role of the wise establishmentarian. He argued that the current deficits are unsustainable, and public investments in infrastructure and education are necessary to keep America strong. "Our country faces tremendous unemployment and shortfalls in investment, and we have a fiscal path that is unsustainable and dangerous in many different respects," he said. And since the estate tax "supplies revenues with no adverse supply-side effects," the proceeds could be used for deficit reduction, for public investments, or to help people afflicted by the economic crisis.
Second on the call was the union leader. You know the type: barrel-chested, tough-talking, confrontational, very much into class warfare. In the union leader's worldview, the top 1 percent have been bogarting all the economic gains for the past few decades. Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, appealed not just to reason, but to emotion. He started by reading a quote from Theodore Roosevelt about the evils of inherited wealth. Speaking with disdain of the Kyl-Lincoln proposal, he said, "We think it's ludicrous that some in Congress are proposing to end the estate tax at the same time they oppose action to create jobs. Anyone who pretends to care about cutting deficits while opposing reinstatement of estate tax is clearly residing on a different planet than working people."
(More here.)
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