▪️Repealing the estate tax wouldn’t “give” money to anyone. It would just allow estates to keep the wealth handed down by the person who earned it. Only when you view everyone’s property as communal property does repealing a tax involve “giving” people money.
▪️Contrary to Sanders’s portrayal, the estate tax constitutes a tiny fraction of federal tax revenue. In 2020, only $17.6B came from estate and gift taxes. That’s just 0.1% of GDP and ~0.5% of Federal tax revenue. By 2031 it’s expected to still be <$50B. It’s a rounding error.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57272#:~:text=CBO%20projects%20that%2C%20under%20current,drop%20(see%20Figure%202).
▪️Bernie gets $1.8T by adding up the wealth of ALL billionaire families ($4.5T) and assuming the government would take 40% ($1.8T) of ALL of it. Which is absurd, as most wealthy people go to great lengths to reduce the taxes their estate pays, and they have the means to work the system.
▪️The CBO acknowledges this, and admits this is why they can’t reliably project estate tax revenues. Warren Buffet, for example, pledged to give away 99% of his wealth before he dies. Many others have similar pledges, meaning Bernie’s numbers are fantasies, billionaires aren’t ever giving up 40% to the govt.
▪️The estate tax has virtually nothing to do with solving the debt crisis, nor in helping the poor. The trivial revenue they provide is almost unnoticeable & it’s not like it goes into some fund to help the poor. The primary impetus behind the estate tax is the desire to take rich people’s stuff.
It’s bizarre to see them seesaw back and forth that Trump is totally clueless and aloof, just golfing all day, then all of a sudden he’s a dangerous king/dictator who’s diligently plotting to seize absolute power.
▪️This one is frustrating because, while it’s nice to see the vigor and speed that DOGE is acting with, they’re also sloppy with some of their findings. This is not some bombshell, millions of dead people’s SS numbers aren’t being paid out to fraudsters.
▪️This problem has been known for some time, you can read an inspector general’s report from 2015 about millions of names on the SS “numident” not being correctly annotated for deaths, even though they were older than 112 (the oldest known American at the time).
https://oig-files.ssa.gov/audits/full/A-06-14-34030_0.pdf
▪️There are innocent explanations for some of these. Expatriates that died outside the country, for example. Or immigrants given temporary work permit who returned to their country, people issued new numbers for various reasons, etc. However, most are simply due to the govt not diligently keeping track of deaths.
▪️It’s embarrassing that the govt has millions of numbers on the numident that are ...
