How to instantly prove conservatives are liars about economics.

[True Blue Door]

Conservative: I stand for people earning their way through hard work, not handouts!

Liberal: So, how do you feel about inheritance taxes?

Conservative: Shut up.

[Kalidurga]

1. tell them you think the minimum wage should be 15 dollars an hour

[safeinOhio]

2. In the capitalist game of monopoly

every one starts out with the same amount of money.

[Scuba]

3. And when one person has all the money, it's game over.

[IronLionZion]

4. Oh, you mean the "death" tax!

Liberals are so looney they even tax you for dying!

And where's my bailouts and subsidies and special tax credits and no bid contracts? Companies are so "efficient"!

[True Blue Door]

7. Whenever a cancervative starts bitching about welfare

I like to say "The difference between a welfare recipient and a trust-fund baby is that welfare recipients usually work for a living."

Also, it never seems to occur to our right honorable dickbag Republican friends that it's a tax on the heirs, not on someone who is beyond legal title to property by virtue of being worm food.

[IronLionZion]

36. Perspective makes all the difference

the different political ideologies are mostly based on viewing the exact same thing in different ways due to subconscious biases.

Lots of trust fund babies actually think what they do is "work". They think that because they have money to "invest", they must have "worked" for it. Assholes.

Ask any of them what's wrong with taxing capital gains and carried interest and dividends as if it was regular earned income from work. Enjoy watching them stumble over their response about things that don't exist like "double taxation".

[True Blue Door]

38. Meanwhile they enjoy double rights by being incorporated.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

5. What about when inheritance taxes make it too expensive to pass down the family farm? nt

[True Blue Door]

6. LOL

[Nuclear Unicorn]

8. Except it's not funny. Families are losing their farms. nt

[jeff47]

9. Or so people claim.

Folks haven't managed to demonstrate that this is an epidemic though.

They also make false claims. For example, the farm was bought for pennies in 1960, and it's now worth millions, so the kids are taxed on millions!! Nope. The appreciation is non-taxable as long as it was your primary residence when you died.

Btw: How to transfer your primary residence to your heirs tax free.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

11. Property doesn't belong to families, it belongs to people.

At the point you die, you always lose all your property, including your farms. The death tax is 100%, and always has been.

What may be happening is not that families are losing their farms, but that people are not receiving free farms just because their parents had them.

And that's no more an injustice than the children of poor parents not receiving free farms is.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

19. Thievery, nothing more.

"The people" aren't working the stolen farms, agri-corps are buying them.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

20. If by "the people" you mean "some of the people, but not all of them" then you are right.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

21. The farms are being stolen.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

22. Nonsense.

Inheritance tax is no more theft than any other kind of tax imposed by an elected government that falls fairly on all.

If anything, it's less so, because it's not taking property from someone who owns it, it's taking property from someone who is dead and has no further use to it.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

23. And giving it to thieves who did nothing to earn it. nt

[Donald Ian Rankin]

24. No, selling it to people in exchange for money.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

25. No. The thieves steal what they want and leave crumbs behind for the family.

[notrightatall]

26. The "death tax" was the favorite tax of our founding fathers.

They saw the problems that "generational wealth" had caused civilization throughout history. In fact, I believe it was one of the first taxes imposed.

[louis-t]

29. It may have been, but it was also discontinued for many years.

I'll check, but pretty sure it was not in place at the turn of the 20th century. I thought FDR brought it back.

[louis-t]

30. Found it. A very good history of inheritance tax.

It was used to raise funds for specific things, but I remember the 'generational wealth' argument also. Currently in place since 1916.

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/ninetyestate.pdf

[Nuclear Unicorn]

31. Get back to me when those applauding the destruction of family farms apply the same zeal

to the Kennedys, Kerrys and Rockefellers. But, hey, they can afford to structure trusts whereas farmers just have a farm they actually have to work.

[notrightatall]

32. I would, and more.

I think an across the board 90% tax on any wealth transfer over, pick a number 5million? maybe 10? adjust it for inflation from time to time. Vast wealth should not be allowed to be passed from generation to generation. That is what makes kings.

[KingCharlemagne]

12. Oh, puh-leeze. Got any links to back up that malarkey? - nt

[Lex]

13. No.

People drag this out like it's happening to tons and tons of people. It's not.

[True Blue Door]

15. What's funny is that you expect anyone to take such a lie seriously.

Shielding Wall Street-spawned trust-fund babies with this fairytale.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

33. It's not an all or nothing prospect. It's possible to alleviate the devastation done to family farms

But don't worry about the Wall St types. The corrupt politicians and their patrons still have trust funds. The Kennedys, Kerrys, buffets, Kochs and Rockefellers will be just fine because they can afford to structure their money but the family scraping by can't.

[True Blue Door]

37. There must be a lot of multimillionaires "scraping by" in Republican fantasy land.

You can practically hear the Depression Era music as you imagine them having to choose a year-old Bentley over a brand new model.

That's some sick shit, bro. People die because of poverty inflicted by wealth accumulation bleeding public services to death. Frankly it's murder.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

40. You obviously have no clue about rural life. Property can be valued in the millions but family

annual income is squarely middle class. Add to that the fact most family farms take on crop loans. We the taxes come through the only way to satisfy the levy is to sell the property.

Your disregard for working families is as illiberal as it is callous and uninformed.

[True Blue Door]

41. Cry me a river, Aesop.

Your fairytales about struggling millionaire "family farmers" were moth-eaten nonsense by the time Lee Atwater fucking invented them.

I'm so sorry to hear that the five or six remaining family farmers in America live a middle-class lifestyle with millions of dollars in safety net under their feet if they need it, while the actual middle-class has El Zilcho because rich people won't pay taxes and prefer to create dynasties than to give anything back to their country.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

42. Apparently you're the conservative from your own OP.

You better hurry back and do something about all those trust fund babies you're so valiantly battling against. You know, the ones who are the patrons of the politicians who write laws that allow trust funds.

[True Blue Door]

43. Everyone could have a trust-fund if we had reasonable inheritance taxes.

[ProfessorGAC]

44. An Easy Exemption

Very high cap on the value of the farm AS LONG AS the farm is maintained as an ongoing concern. Sell the farm and pay the taxes. Keep the farm and there are no taxes on (just guessing), the first $4 or 5 million. (Figuring 250 acres at $6k per acre and all the farm equipment needed, plus the existing inventory of farming consumibles.)

If it's a giant factory farm, the taxes could be progressive as it rises above the cap.

Exempting an ongoing concern is an easy fix.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

10. That's not a bug, it's a feature.

The whole point of inheritance tax is that people shouldn't receive expensive property like farms just because their parents had them.

[Brickbat]

14. With the exemption at $5 million, it's not an issue very often.

[energumen]

16. I don't have exact numbers

but the average family farm may be able run up over 5 million in value without much problems when you consider the cost of the land itself plus equipment, buildings, livestock etc.

The only people that inheritance taxes on farms help is large corporate farms since they are the ones that can afford to buy the land

[Brickbat]

18. Here are some older numbers to consider.

In 2005, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that if the exemption were set at $3.5 million in 2000, only 65 of the 4,640 farm estates filing returns that year would have hit that threshold required to pay the estate tax, and 13 wouldn't have been able to.

That indeed sucks for those 13 families. The exemption is now $5 million, and that's doubled if the farm is owned by a couple. The idea that this policy is taking away the farms of hundreds or even dozens of families is ludicrous.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

34. No, they help all the people who benefit from e.g. social security or medicare.

Inheritance tax is by far the fairest form of taxation, and I suspect also one of the ones with the least negative economic side effects.

[unblock]

27. this is a horsehockey argument for several reasons.

first, they've not been able to come up with 3 examples of this actually happening.

second, however often it happens, it's teeny tiny compared to the vast advantage of billionaires giving their kids billions tax free.

third, if you inherit a farm worth enough to trip the inheritance tax (the first $5.34 million is tax-free these days, only the excess is taxed, at 40$) you have at least two oh-so-horrible choices:

(a) sell the farm to pay the taxes and enjoy the loot, guaranteed to be at the very least, $5.34 million if you're at all affected by this.
(b) take out a loan to pay the taxes. just because a farm is an illiquid asset doesn't mean that the free market doesn't have a solution to this problem.


note, importantly, that this whole argument is a distraction. the real goal is to allow billionaires to pass billions to their kids tax-free. if they really cared about family farms THEY COULD WRITE AN EXEPTION INTO INHERITANCE TAX LAW FOR FAMILY FARMS. but that's clearly not what they want, they want the entire inheritance tax to go away, and they're exploiting a concocted teeny tiny hypothetical argument that involves some homey situation (cash strapped, "family farm", while ignoring that it's worth many millions) to make people feel sympathetic.

[csziggy]

28. Right now the first $5 million of an estate is tax free

So that family farm has to be pretty big!

I do understand how the farm equipment and other assets can add up, but still - $5 million tax free?!

[truebluegreen]

35. Zombie Lie Alert!

Back in the day, one of the key Republican arguments against the estate tax was that it forced hardworking, salt-of-the-earth children of small farmers to sell the family plot in order to pay their taxes after dad died. It was a sad story, but with one problem: no one could find even a single small farmer who had been forced to liquidate in order to satisfy Uncle Sam's voracious maw. Even the American Farm Bureau Federation was eventually forced to admit that it couldn't come up with a single example, and a few years later the Congressional Budget Office estimated that under the now-current exemption level, only a tiny handful of small farms were likely to owe any estate tax to begin with — and of those, only about a dozen lacked the assets to pay their taxes. And even those dozen had 14 years to pay the bill as long as the kids kept running the farm. In other words, the story was a fraud from beginning to end.

Read the whole article here: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/09/zombie-lies-taxes-and-small-businesses

The American Farm Bureau couldn't come up with an example; I'd be interested to see links to even one of yours.

[IronLionZion]

39. Find one real life example.

go ahead, we'll wait.

What's happening to family farms is NOT the inheritance tax

There are many other economic issues at play, and the big agri-corps are exploiting subsidies and other loopholes meant to help family farms, but the problem is not from passing the farm to their kids. that's conservative anti-tax propaganda. Some people will go through extraordinary leaps of logic to avoid paying taxes. You know, because socialism.

[Dreamer Tatum]

17. If I'm ever in Caricatureland, I'll try that. nt