Death Tax

One curious thing about the Estate Tax is that nobody seems to have a problem if the beneficiaries are "earning it" or not. On one hand, Republicans like to snivel that people receiving unemployment insurance are sitting on their parents' couches eating Cheetos and refusing to try to look for work because they enjoy sucking the government's teat. But we also have no real idea how hard any of the heirs of the estate tax are working. Maybe they're busting their asses the same way the people made all that money in the first place did, and maybe they're not, but I don't see why the default setting for them need to be any different than that of our views on the unemployed, especially when it's costing us about $68 billion over the next two years. Sure, one is a "family" matter and the other isn't, but you can't pretend to give a shit about the deficit and yet be okay with the Estate Tax. Meanwhile, we seem to be okay rewarding a group of people who for all we know are sitting on their parents' couches eating Cheetos, as long as it's a couch that costs more than the average person's house.

Of course, the big joke is we're led to believe that an Estate Tax means that these heirs will all of a sudden become Oliver Twist, which, to their credit, is a brilliant marketing campaign by the GOP (as usual.)