Happy Tax Day, little people! Our Republican overlords in the United States Congress would like you to know they don't particularly give a damn what you think, no matter what their current crop of 2016 candidates says.
Because you, little peons, did not elect them, and they seek to reward those who elect.
To prove their fealty to the Houses of Walton, Koch, DeVos, Adelson and more, there is a vote planned today in the House to repeal the estate tax law and create a permanent aristocracy. Because what says populism more than repealing a section of the tax code that benefits a teeny, tiny slice of America that holds more wealth than the bottom 50 percent combined?
They’ve discovered, belatedly, that income inequality is a problem, and they’re no longer proposing to give tax breaks to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. Now they are proposing to give tax breaks to the wealthiest two-tenths of 1 percent of Americans.
On Tuesday afternoon, the House Rules Committee took up H.R. 1105, the “Death Tax Repeal Act of 2015,” with plans to bring it to a vote on the chamber floor Wednesday — Tax Day. It is an extraordinarily candid expression of the majority’s priorities: A tax cut costing the treasury $269 billion over a decade that would exclusively benefit individuals with wealth of more than $5.4 million and couples with wealth of more than $10.9 million.
That’s a tax break for only the 5,500 wealthiest households in the country each year, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. Of those, the 318 wealthiest estates each year — those worth $50 million or more — would see an average windfall of $20 million each, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
And this at a time when the gap between rich and poor is already worse than it has been since the Great Depression? Never in the history of plutocracy has so much been given away to so few who need it so little.
Nevertheless, the plutocrats expect their minions to perform, and so they have.
