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Three of the things (out of many other things) that jumped out at me in this column...
and...
This is interesting that only 2% of estates were taxed, because the exemption is currently $1 million dollars (and Kerry wants to raise it to several million, not abolish it completely like Bush wants to do). From reading what some have said on this forum and elsewhere, I would have thought that the exemption was much lower, like a hundred thousand or something, but 98% of the time, no money is sent to Uncle Sam when someone dies and there is an inheritance.
Another big surprise - Corporations are paying much less of the total federal taxes now than they were 40 years ago. Again, with all the blathering from certain people about how corporations are overtaxed, this must be quite a surprise to them.
Three of the things (out of many other things) that jumped out at me in this column...
If Bush gets what he wants, the income tax will become a misnomer—it will really be a salary tax. Almost all income taxes would come from paychecks—80 percent of income for most families, less than half for the top 1 percent. Meanwhile taxpayers receiving dividends, interest and capital gains, known collectively as investment income, would have a much lighter burden than salary earners—or maybe none at all.
The Democrats were also burned, badly, by not fixing the estate tax. They let it become a perceived threat to middle- and upper-middle-income households by refusing to raise the amount exempted from the tax to keep pace with the nation's growing wealth. The Democrats' sloth gave Bush an opening to seem like a populist by proposing to kill the tax. Only about 2 percent of estates send a check to Uncle Sam, but that fact's been obscured by Bush's successful campaign to demonize it as a "death tax" imperiling the well-being of the masses.
One reason the federal budget has been under such pressure the past few years is that corporations are picking up a lot less of the tab than they used to—7.4 percent, down from 20.3 percent 40 years ago. A major reason corporate taxes are a smaller part of the pie is that companies have gotten far more aggressive about avoiding taxes. They prefer the risk of being exposed publicly as pigs to the certain wrath of their shareholders if profits don't keep climbing nicely.
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