Two Links and a Funny Picture
Monday, January 13, 2003
Two interesting articles worth sharing. In the first, "Long Live the Estate Tax!" Bill Gates, Sr. and Chuck Collins argue that reforming the estate tax laws will help soothe growing budget deficits and, more importantly, slow America's slide into a second Gilded Age. The last few paragraphs are really interesting:
Proposals to reform the tax have been blocked since 2000 by the "all or nothing" repeal lobby, which understands the peril of not having smaller estates as camouflage. Once exemptions rise above $3 million, it becomes impossible to find a credible and photogenic farmer or restaurant owner who will complain about what opponents call the "death tax." It's hard enough to find them now. The pro-repeal American Farm Bureau was asked to produce an example of a farmer who had lost a farm because of the estate tax. It could not identify a single one.
Lost in this debate are the benefits to our country of maintaining an estate tax. Originally passed in 1916, the estate tax was a fundamentally American response to the excesses of the Gilded Age. Populist reformers labored for the three decades before 1916 to pass federal income and estate taxes in order to shift the tax burden, mostly in the form of nineteenth-century tariff duties and excise taxes, off of Midwestern and Southern farm states and onto the wealthy Northeastern states. But underlying the movement for an estate tax was a recognition that too much concentrated wealth and power was putting our democracy at risk. We had fought a revolution to reject hereditary political and economic power--and the dizzying inequalities of the Gilded Age violated a fundamental American ideal of equality of opportunity.
We are now in a second Gilded Age. Instead of taking steps that would strengthen our democracy, we're heading backward to the wealth inequalities of a century ago. We need to preserve the estate tax in states and at the federal level for exactly the reason it is under assault. In a democracy, we should be offended when the power of concentrated wealth brazenly attempts to shape the terms of policy debate and dictate the rules of our society.
In the other, "So, Now Bigger Is Better?" David Broder points out the discrepencies between Bush's campaign promises — "you can't be for big government and big bureaucracy and still be for the little guy" — and the current situation:
That was then. Now that Bush is running the federal government, its size doesn't bother him so much. Two years after taking office, Bush is presiding over the biggest, most expensive federal government in history. He has created a mammoth Cabinet department, increased federal spending, imposed new federal rules on local and state governments, and injected federal requirements into every public school in America.
When I read pieces like this, I actually feel sympathy for folks like Pat Buchanan, traditional conservatives with real conservative values. What I don't get is the public support of Bush's measures by everyday Republicans, who tend to tout him as a second coming of Reagan. At least Reagan had vision. Broder's piece seems fairly well-balanced to me: he readily admits that at least one-third of our expanding budget can be attributed to "war on terror" costs and that America is now paying for many of Clinton's initiatives. He handles Bush's muddled education policy well, though, and also takes some well-deserved jabs at the Homeland Security Department.
Speaking of homeland security, my friend Doug put this graphic together. In the immortal words of Homer Simpson: It's funny 'cause it's true.
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