As Predictable as 'Death and Taxes,' GOP Pushes Billionaire Estate Tax Cut

"Nothing illustrates more how much the political system is rigged in favor of the wealthy," warn critics of the bill

by Lauren McCauley, staff writer | CommonDreams.org

In another boon for U.S. billionaires, Congressional Republicans are planning to ring in this year's Tax Day with a vote to repeal the federal estate tax.

Under the bill (H.R. 1105) offered by Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas), estates—no matter how large—would not be taxed, whereas under current law, a deceased person’s assets must be worth more than $5.43 million before they are subject to the tax.

Further, the legislation would also repeal a generation-skipping transfer tax and lower the top marginal gift tax rate. In an email to Common Dreams, Scott Klinger, director of Revenue and Spending Policies at the Center for Effective Government, said the bill is really "repeal on steroids—it would allow vast amounts of wealth to pass from one generation to the next."

The report “Working for the Few,” contains some startling statistics on what it calls the “growing tide of inequality.”

The report states:

• Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population.
• The wealth of the one percent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion. That’s 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population.
• The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world.
• Seven out of ten people live in countries where economic inequality has increased in the last 30 years.
• The richest one percent increased their share of income in 24 out of 26 countries for which we have data between 1980 and 2012.
• In the US, the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer.

Did you know that there are nearly 102 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now? And 20 percent of all families in the United States do not have a single member that is employed. So how in the world can the government claim that the unemployment rate has “dropped” to “6.3 percent”?

Published on PressTV

Well, it all comes down to how you define who is “unemployed”. For example, last month the government moved another 988,000 Americans into the “not in the labor force” category. According to the government, at this moment there are 9.75 million Americans that are “unemployed” and there are 92.02 million Americans that are “not in the labor force” for a grand total of 101.77 million working age Americans that do not have a job.

Back in April 2000, only 5.48 million Americans were unemployed and only 69.27 million Americans were “not in the labor force” for a grand total of 74.75 million Americans without a job. That means that the number of working age Americans without a job has risen by 27 million since the year 2000. Any way that you want to slice that, it is bad news.

Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges spoke with RT’s Abby Martin on “Breaking the Set” about the forces driving the acceleration of global decline.

breakingtheset:

Only a few miles separate the Baltimore neighborhoods of Roland Park and Upton Druid Heights. But residents of the two areas can measure the distance between them in years—twenty years, to be exact. That’s the difference in life expectancy between Roland Park, where people live to be 83 on average, and Upton Druid Heights, where they can expect to die at 63.

Underlying these gaps in life expectancy are vast economic disparities. Roland Park is an affluent neighborhood with an unemployment rate of 3.4 percent, and a median household income above $90,000. More than 17 percent of people in Upton Druid Heights are unemployed, and the median household income is just $13,388.

It’s no secret that this sort of economic inequality is increasing nationwide; the disparity between America’s richest and poorest is the widest it’s been since the Roaring Twenties. Less discussed are the gaps in life expectancy that have widened over the past twenty-five years between America’s counties, cities and neighborhoods. While the country as a whole has gotten richer and healthier, the poor have gotten poorer, the middle class has shrunk and Americans without high school diplomas have seen their life expectancy slide back to what it was in the 1950s. Economic inequalities manifest not in numbers, but in sick and dying bodies.