The Founders broke with England, a class-based society. They recognized the limitless accumulation of wealth over generations inevitably leads to an aristocracy.

The Republican party today has made itself the party of that aristocracy. On behalf of the super rich, ‘folksy’ pseudo-conservatives have cleverly couched things in terms of “death taxes,” “losing the family farm” and “basic fairness.” The Super Rich will keep every penny; they can buy what they need and have no need for a government.

ABQjournal: House Votes To Perpetuate Loophole for Wealthy By Sergio Pareja, Assistant Professor, UNM School of Law

With huge deficits as far as the eye can see, calls for urgent program cuts, claims that Social Security is in crisis, and war in the Middle East, House lawmakers passed a bill Wednesday that would make a huge tax giveaway permanent. The giveaway, part of a bill to make estate tax repeal permanent, is a $5.6 million income tax loophole for the nation’s richest families that is unknown to most Americans. …

Most proponents of this tax believe that it is a statement of who we are as a country. We are, ideally, a place where the person who becomes wealthy does so because of hard work and industriousness. We are not a country where who you are is determined entirely by the family into which you happen to be born. In short, we are not Louis XIV’s France, a place with a gilded class of nobles. …

In my nearly decade of tax law practice, I never personally heard of one operating family farm or small business that was shut down because of the estate tax. Not one. As most estate planners who serve the ultra-wealthy would know, people who engage in complicated estate planning are quite often the aristocratically wealthy, people from families in which members have not had to work in three, four, or even five generations. …

Suppose Daddy and Mommy Warbucks buy stock in Microsoft for $10 million and it increases in value over several years to $15.6 million. They die and leave it to their son, Richie Rich Warbucks. Although that $5.6 million of appreciation was never taxed at all, Richie inherits the property with no estate tax and a $15.6 million income tax basis. When Richie sells the stock, he, like his parents, will not pay a penny of tax on that entire $5.6 million of gain. Nada. Zilch.

So, while you and I toil away at our jobs and pay income taxes equal to, say, a third of our income, Richie pays absolutely nothing solely because he was born into the Warbucks’ family.

Start powdering your wigs. Louis XIV would be proud.

One can easily foresee John Dimdahl’s next column in which he rages about “class warfare” and “liberal professors.” Yawn. mjh