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Last week, the GOP finally released their tax plan, called the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. There are parts of it that conservatives should be applauding, such as the removing of certain tax brackets, bigger standard deductions, closing the illegal immigrant tax refund loophole, raising the child tax credit, lowering corporate and business taxes, and capping mortgage interest deductions. Conservative Review’s Chris Pandalfo lays out the details of these good policies. The Daily Wire’s Editor-In-Chief Ben Shapiro elaborates as well.
However, there are bad parts to this plan as well. These include, most importantly, the GOP having snuck in a hidden tax bracket on top earners: after the first $1 million in taxable income, there would be a 6 percent surcharge on every dollar earned. Shapiro makes the argument that this may poll popularly, since we are so accustomed to hearing about the benefits of “soaking the rich,” but it isn’t good economics, since the “rich” are usually the ones who pay the most taxes anyway and are generally the country’s job creators. In addition, it isn’t good politics, because now the GOP is playing in the paradigm of the Left, using class warfare in their legislation, which, in my opinion, is un-American.
Conservative Review Editor-In-Chief, radio and LevinTV host Mark Levin made this argument as well in his Thursday radio show, accusing Republicans or falling for the Left’s classic class warfare talk, saying that “The Republicans are sounding like good little Marxists. They’re worried about class warfare rather than slashing taxes across the board.”
We should applaud this
However, as much of a mixed bag this plan is, there is one aspect of it that everyone should be able to get behind—the repeal of the estate tax.
The estate tax, known colloquially as the “death tax,” is a tax on the transfer of the estate of a deceased person. The GOP plan calls for killing the death tax after six years, where the estate tax exemption will double until 2024, and at that point it will be repealed entirely.
The estate tax is possibly one of the most immoral laws we have in the United States, in my humble opinion. For one, it taxes property, capital and income, whether tangible or not, that has been taxed during the deceased’s lifetime. This second taxation is nothing more than pure theft.
As Greg Gutfeld of Fox News noted, “[t]he death tax is an immoral act. You’re taking money that is already taxed, [from] families who’ve saved this money for years… [W]hether you make $50,000 or $50 million per year, it’s immoral.”
In addition, Pat Boone and Jim Martin, in a piece for The Hill, note that the death tax goes back to as early as ancient Egypt and that the idea of the tax was “spawned by tyrannical regimes whose essential business model was the conquering and enslavement of other peoples.”
And finally, the death tax does nothing but plunder the grieving widows and orphans of property that is rightfully theirs. This isn’t only immoral, it is pure evil and a selfish, greedy move on the government’s part.
So much for the party of the little guy that wants to keep this tax in place.
Remember, this GOP plan is just a proposal, and odds are that it will be tweaked many times before it comes up for a vote. But no matter what, the death tax must be repealed.
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