Posted by
The Hermit Crab on Tuesday, September 01, 2009 9:06:14 PM
Abolish the Death Tax
Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate, has an essay in sister magazine Newsweek in which he counters talk of ObamaCare medical rationing by claiming that Republicans are trying to kill old people:
It was [Sen. Chuck] Grassley himself who devised the "Throw Mama From the Train" provision of the GOP's 2001 tax cut. The estate-tax revision he championed will reduce the estate tax to zero next year. But when it expires at year's end, the tax will jump back up to its previous level of 55 percent. Grassley's exploding tax break has an entirely foreseeable, if unintended, consequence: it incentivizes ailing, elderly rich people to end their lives--paging Dr. Kevorkian--before midnight on Dec. 31, 2010. It also gives their children an incentive to sign DNR orders and switch off respirators in time for the deadline. This would be a great plot for a P. D. James novel if it weren't an actual piece of legislation.
This is not merely hypothetical. Serious economists take the possibility seriously. In a 2001 paper entitled "Dying to Save Taxes," economists from the University of Michigan and the University of British Columbia examined 13 changes in U.S. tax law since 1917 and concluded that benefactors die in greater numbers just before tax hikes and just after tax cuts. A 2006 study done in Australia, which abolished its inheritance tax in July 1979, reached the same conclusion. Statistics showed that more than half the people who would ordinarily have died in the last week of June 1979--and whose heirs would have been subject to the tax--managed to avoid it by surviving into July. Republicans in Congress have created a similar inducement for Grandma not to die before January 2010, but to make sure she is gone by January 2011.
We have to admit, Weisberg has a point--although for some reason he neglects to name the Democratic lawmakers who are leading the effort to make repeal of the death tax permanent.
What James Taranto apparently forgot is that the Democrats insisted on the 10-year "sunset" clause on all of the Bush tax cuts. If memory serves, it was Robert Byrd who led the charge to get the limits on the duration on the cuts. Since the tax cuts were enacted, Republicans have tried several times to get them made permanent. The Democrats blocked every attempt. Therefore, it is inaccurate and unfair of Taranto to blame Charles Grassley for the upcoming estate tax increase. He's not this conservative crab's favorite politician, but he's not responsible for this one.