Estate Tax Lunacy: “A decades-long campaign by right-wing activists (brilliantly documented by Yale professors Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro in their book ‘Death by a Thousand Cuts’) has convinced many Americans that the estate tax poses a threat to countless hardworking families. That was always nonsense, and under the estate tax revisions that almost all Democrats support — raising the threshold for eligibility to $3.5 million for an individual and $7 million for a couple — it becomes more nonsensical still. Under the $3.5 million exemption, the number of family-owned small businesses required to pay any taxes in the year 2000 would have been just 94, according to a study by the Congressional Budget Office. The number of family farms that would have had to sell any assets to pay that tax would have been 13.

On the other hand, an estate tax repeal would save the estate of Vice President Cheney between $13 million and $61 million, according to the publicly available data on his net worth. It would save the estate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld between $32 million and $101 million. The estate of retired Exxon Mobil chairman Lee Raymond would pocket a cozy $164 million. As for the late Sam Walton’s kids, whose company already makes taxpayers foot the bill for the medical expenses of thousands of its employees, the cost to the government for not taxing their estates would run into the multiple billions.”

Don’t you just love seeing an example of great marketing at work?

I am caused to remember the quote from, of all people, Abraham Lincoln, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” Which, in my Google search, led me to this quote attributed to the present holder of the office, “You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.” George W. Bush. And next Google led me to “Leon Panetta Commentaries”, who expanded the quote more fully to include the preceding sentence:

“In a now famous quote, President Abraham Lincoln was said to have commented to a visitor to the White House in 1865: “If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

Which pretty much brings us to where we now find ourselves in America…We have been “fooled”. Personally, I don’t like to use such ambiguous words. Folks, we have been lied to. Over and over and over again, starting in the ’90’s as George W Bush began his attack on America for the ruling class that put him in office. I have followed George W Bush and his road to the White House with some bit of disdain over the years. Listened to him lie about his accomplishments in the state 4 generations of my family have called home. Become frustrated with the American Press Corps as they refused to live up to their part of the bargain we the people struck over 200 years ago to protect their “freedoms”.

Now, when they are being attacked by the very administration their lack of integrity helped put and then keep in power, they scream first amendment. Where were they with their fact checkers in 1999 and 2003? What were they doing as the lies were passed of as opposing opinions? Whose rights were trampled when the current administration lied us into war with Iraq? What ever happened to the old equal access rules on TV (yes I know, they were inconvenient to those in power).

Then there’s the Congress…