It never ceases to amaze me that the President and Congressional Republicans continue to get away with their laughable claims that the permanent repeal of the estate tax is a means of giving Hard-Working Americans® the money that they have earned.
Of course, the politically brilliant strategy of calling it “the death tax” has gone a long way toward promoting this claptrap. Having an army of on-message pundits and other stooges flood the media with the agreed-upon phraseology doesn’t hurt either. Listening to all of this hokum, one imagines breadlines filled with poor American farmers and entrepreneurs, forced to turn to public charity because the government stole their rightful inheritances, rendering decades of hard work meaningless.
Never mind the fact that only a tiny fraction of Americans actually qualify for the inheritance tax, and never mind that the Republicans who so desparately want to repeal the tax have made nary a peep about reducing the payroll tax, a move which would result in an immediate increase in the take-home pay of the vast majority of workers in this country. No, this bunch would rather protect the unearned iheritances of the super-wealthy, and dress it up in the same tired “Party of Fiscal Discipline” rhetoric they slap on all the rest of the kleptocratic initiatives.