Dead Patriots

by digby

Estate planners like to jokingly warn their clients to sleep with one eye open in 2010 because it’s commonly referred to as the “throw momma from the train” year. You can see why that is, here:

You’ll all recall why that happened. The Bush administration wanted to lower the estate tax but they didn’t want to take responsibility for adding to the deficit. So they had it “sunset” in 2010 after they’d brought it to zero, knowing that it would be pulling teeth to reinstate it once it had been eliminated.

Democrats are now in charge and one might expect that they’d do the responsible thing and reinstate the law to its pre-Bush levels, particularly when the entire village is working itself into some kind of mass hysteria over the deficit. But guess what?

House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer said the chamber will vote this week to permanently extend the estate tax rates scheduled to expire at the end of 2009, but the road will be tougher in the Senate.

The House will take up a bill introduced by Democrat Earl Pomeroy last week to extend the current policy of taxing estates over a $3.5 million threshold at a rate of 45 percent.

That’s the lowest level of the Bush tax cuts. True, it doesn’t eliminate them completely in 2010 as the Bush legislation pretended to do, but nobody seriously expected that to happen. Bush and the boys gambled that the 2009 congress, no matter which party had the majority, would never vote to raise the taxes back to their previous levels. And it looks like they made a good bet.

“We believe that a permanent extension of the existing law is the best policy,” Steny Hoyer, the chamber’s majority leader, told reporters.

Preserving the current rates will be harder in the U.S. Senate, because that body’s rules require a way to pay for it.

A 10-year extension of the tax would cost an estimated $234 billion versus allowing the tax to revert to a higher rate in 2011, as currently scheduled, according to congressional aides.

What they should do is extend the 2009 rates to 2010 and then let the whole damned thing go back to where it was before Bush took office. These politicians and their rich patrons should not be able to have it both ways — lowering taxes on the wealthy while pretending that they aren’t raising the deficit and then screaming about deficits and complaining about raising taxes when the whole thing blows up.

Estate taxes should be high. This is not an aristocracy and the concentration of wealth in this country is already distorting our society in myriad ways. And if the deficit is the biggest threat to the American way of life the billionaires keep insisting it is, then perhaps the wealthy dead among them can be asked to help their country in its time of need even if the live ones are too “talented” and “productive” to be asked to sacrifice.

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