That means that George Steinbrenner's heirs will get a nice bonanza of about half a billion dollars on an estimated $1.1 billion inheritance without having to work a day for it.
The Republicans still want to get rid of the inheritance tax. They also say that people should take responsibility for themselves - that they ought to work for what they get, and if they don't work, they don't get. Am I missing something, or is there a contradiction here?
According to the Republicans, the inheritance tax - or, as they prefer to call it, the "death tax" - penalizes "small-business men" and "jobs-givers."
Small-business men like those fat-cat executives who gave themselves generous bonuses while their companies were getting bailed out by you, the generous citizens, and after they nearly brought down the economy with complex financial instruments that they didn't understand.
Jobs-givers like the corporate moguls who have been giving American jobs to China, Vietnam, and other countries while they enjoy seven- and eight-figure compensation packages.
President Obama wants to extend the Bush tax cuts for the 98 percent of American families who earn less than $250,000 and for individuals who earn less than $200,000. The Republicans insist on continuing the tax cuts for the 2 percent above those levels. According to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, that would mean we would have to borrow $700 billion more in the next decade, "adding significantly to an already unsustainable level of debt."
Wait a minute. I thought the Republicans wanted to reduce the unsustainable level of debt.
Well, they say they do, but not by taking it out of the hard-earned salaries of the financial titans of Wall Street, or from the merely affluent who earn upward of a quarter of a million dollars a year, which puts them in the upper 2 percent.
