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Doing the Nation's Business?

Monday, June 05, 2006

It's good to know that our "duly elected" officials in the Senate are doing their level best to address the concerns of all Americans. Tis the season for empty gestures and pandering to your base with a quick "what-have-you-done-for-me-lately" shout out to the two competing factions of the Republican party.

Today, the President and the rubber stamp Republican Senate reintroduce a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. The dog and pony show for the Deliverance Wing of the Republican Party has absolutely no chance of passing in either the Senate, which requires a two-thirds majority, or in the states, which would require that 38 out of 50 states ratify the proposed amendment. Nothing says "good government" better than an abject waste of time aimed squarely at a backward minority of the population.

And, speaking of minority portions of the population, let's not forget the second item of important government business on the Senate's agenda, repealing the Estate Tax, or Death Tax if you prefer conservative misnomers. I for one am truly concerned about the plight of those downtrodden members of our society who have their long waited for inheritances of over $2 million unfairly burdened with taxes to pay for governmental services. Those people have spent years being nice to their relatives only because they wanted a piece of the pie and it's really not fair that they should have to give any part of that money to the goverment. I mean really, who would want to rub grandma's bunions or get her teeth out of the cup on the nightstand if they knew that when she finally croaked you'd have to give up a single dollar that you hadn't earned.

Snide comments aside, the numbers just don't support any of the whining going on. The current threshhold is $2 million for a single person and $4 million for couples with the levels rising to $3.5 million for sigles and $7 million for couples by 2009. Let's be clear, that means your portion of an estate must be higher than those levels before you are forced to pay taxes on that inheritance. This is not a tax levied against the estate itself, as so many callers to C-SPAN's Washington Journal claimed this morning.

I have to take a moment to comment on a couple of the callers to the Washington Journal on this topic. First, there must be some talking point floating around the right-wing world regarding how to "discuss" the estate tax issue because I heard at least three out of 24 callers spin the same yarn about their father having worked his way out of the coal mines and building up an estate worth $1 million dollars which was unfairly - "sob" - taxed.

The best call of the segment, however, had to be a caller who claimed his father had amassed over $100 million in assets because he was so much smarter than the rest of us. The caller wanted to know why he should have to change his lifestyle, which he described as pretty good, because the rest of us weren't smart enough to not be poor. He actually said that people who are poor should accept their station in life and leave him to enjoy "his" wealth. I personally can't believe this guy was for real because nobody could be that stupid, could they? That's a question for another post.

What I getting at is that while troops continue to die in Iraq, while over 46 million Americans continue to live without access to health-care, the Republicans in power continue to waste their time and ours. Enjoy the show.