Two Taxes, One Lie

You can't escape death and taxes, so the saying goes. You can however avoid a lot of taxes if you're wealthy and powerful enough to lobby Congress and twist the tax code into a pretzel.

Contrary to what you hear from the corporate media, think tanks and wealthy political candidates or candidates who are solely owned subsidiaries of the wealthy, it is not the rich of this country who pay the bulk of the taxes, it is the working poor and the middle class. Without them this country would fold and their voices are all but ignored on the issue of taxes.

Taxes are necessary, there can be no society without them but in our country all you hear about is income tax, but that is just one tax. When I have debated taxes with people and start to argue that everyone pays taxes and then proceed to list them I have literally been told, "let's stay focused on income tax", I of course say let's not. Absolutely no one, including the poorest among us who qualify for Earned Income Credit, avoid paying a wide variety of local, state and federal taxes.

My focus today is on two taxes that have been a subject of discussion and distortion my whole life. The first is the estate tax or what it's opponents have dubbed the "death" tax. Sounds ominous and absurd, doesn't it? You can't even die without being taxed. The argument against it is that it is unfair to small businesses and the most heart tugging one, the family farm. Currently for a married couple the first 10.1 million dollars of an estate are exempt from the so called death tax. There are no "family" farms worth this sum. There are corporate farms, of which there are many, that exceed this, but make no mistake there is nothing small or defenseless about them. There are no small businesses which are worth this amount unless you change the terms of the meaning of small business, which we have done, surprise! Just a few years ago I wrote a piece on this very change. At that time, because of a change in language, Bechtel, one of the largest construction companies in the world with gross annual revenues of 60 billion dollars was reclassified as a small business. The argument against the tax is that the money has already been taxed which isn't true because what tax that has been paid was not through ordinary income tax, if in fact taxed at all. The estate tax is about not building unstoppable family oligarchs who contribute nothing to the very society that has enriched them and bestowed great opportunity upon them. There are few people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and maybe Mark Zuckerburg ( the jury is out on him) who are committed to give away the bulk of their wealth through charitable venues. But do not weep too hard for all of those other rich families who face a potential tax on huge estates because through that manipulated and complex tax code they have acquired a myriad of ways, including trusts, to avoid those taxes.

The second tax is the corporate income tax, which is the highest rate in the world. Do you know why it's so high? Because it doesn't matter. The biggest corporations in America pay nothing or almost nothing on this tax. General Electric, one of the largest companies in the world routinely pays zero. Do you think they're not making any money? Again, that giant overly complex tax code of ours makes certain these giants are protected and insulated against meeting their social obligations. I'm all for lowering the corporate tax rates to the lowest in the world but only if our tax code is rewritten completely to deliver equitable rates for all. We know that American Corporations are leaving trillions of untaxed dollars abroad in various tax havens and we do nothing about it because our political leaders are hypocrites and we the American people are lazy, uninformed and unwilling to apply proper pressure at the ballot box. We are too busy being concerned with whether or not a candidate proclaims his allegiance to Jesus and depending on the region, whether you support a woman having control of her own body or should be denied the right of self-determination. We also believe in throwing the bums out of Congress, except for our bum because he or she is a God fearing righteous individual that also pushed through some extra money for a state of the art auditorium at our favorite high school. So no bums get thrown out and the ridiculousness continues and we continue to complain that nothing gets done.

We also continue to divide ourselves up into groups aligned with religious and social issues arguing the other side is responsible for the alleged deterioration of America that our preferred talking heads say is occurring, while self-interested think tanks conduct polling among like minded participants that validate the lie which makes the groups feel justified. Meanwhile the real work of the country is done by the manipulators and it is they and their favored which reap the rewards.