Kill the Death Tax © July 28, 2005, Rod D. Martin Send to a Friend Printer Friendly Post to Del.icio.us Digg This Page Spread the Word Tell Your Friends: Our growth -- and our successes -- depend entirely on word of mouth. We MUST spread the word. To send a brief email to your circle of friends, click here. Join the Fight! Current Campaigns: Petition Congress and other leaders and make a difference today. Click here. Volunteer: We're building an army that's sweeping America. If you have time or skills to volunteer, click here. Donate: All this costs money. George Soros, Teddy Kennedy and Michael Moore have it: will we? Please make a financial contribution today. Tools For Victory Activist Center: Learn how to really make a difference, for your candidates and for your beliefs. Click here. Issues Center: Learn more about the ideas and policies shaping America, and how we'll build a better tomorrow. Click here. After a false alarm yesterday -- that permanent Death Tax repeal would come to a final vote in the U.S. Senate today -- the most obnoxious tax in America nevertheless remains on track for the ash heap of history. That is, if we keep it there. It's none too soon. Since its enactment in 1916, the Death Tax has actually cost more jobs and destroyed more small businesses and family farms than it's raised in government revenue. That's no accident. Death Tax proponents never meant their handiwork to raise real money: the levy was, from its very beginning, intended as a means of income redistribution, “of taking from the rich to give to the poor”. It was pure socialism from day one, a key plank of both the Socialist and Communist Party platforms, and utterly anti-family at its core. But the joke was on the suckers who believed the left's “fairness” drivel. Because even if it were okay to steal from the rich, even if it were more virtuous somehow to take their life's painstaking work and give it to the government instead of their children and grandchildren, it was never the rich who suffered. Rich folks, you see, can afford the armies of accountants and tax lawyers needed to avoid the tax. They can hide their money in trusts, in foundations, in offshore accounts, all both legal and reasonable. They aren't fools; and unlike the rest of us, they have the means to avoid getting mugged. Not so the little guy, though, the families just beginning to get ahead. And it's that rising class, threatening their “betters”, that the tax has always stalked. According to a December 1998 U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee Report, the Death Tax is indeed a leading culprit in family farm and business failure. In one survey, nearly one-third of black business owners say their heirs will have to sell their business just to pay the Death Tax, while over 80% say they lack the assets to pay. The alleged party of “civil rights” is in the business of snuffing their dreams. In 1995 alone, 89% of all taxable estates had $2.5 million or less -- easily accumulated just in a couple's IRAs and 401(k)s without ever constituting “wealth” -- and 54% of all Death Taxes paid came from net taxable estates of $5 million or less. That's the very Mom-and-Pop corner grocery, or the third generation family farm, that wealthy Democrats like trial lawyer John Edwards pretends to care about when he talks about “two Americas.” He fails to mention that he's the one keeping the poorer, frequently blacker America “in its place”. Even Russia knows better. Yes, you read that right. Last month, Russia abolished its Death Tax. The land of the proletarian revolution itself, where any and all accumulation of wealth was abolished eighty years ago in a hail of bullets and blood, has finally left the totalitarian twentieth century behind. Acting on President Vladimir Putin's proposal of just this past April, the State Duma voted 414-2 not only to end the confiscatory taxation of inheritances, but also the gift tax to close relatives, something else more “enlightened” Americans have not quite managed to do. It's not for lack of trying. Two months ago -- symbolically enough on April 15th -- the U.S. House of Representatives voted 272-162 to put the Death Tax to rest once and for all. As well they should have: over 89% of Americans agree that it's unfair to tax incomes and then tax that same money after we die; and 96% of manufacturing firms feel the Death Tax threatens their long-term growth. It's time for the Senate to follow the House's lead. It almost happened today. But whether it happens in an eleventh-hour session in the next forty-eight hours, or immediately after the August recess, the bottom line is the same: Americans are entitled to what Steve Forbes and Larry Kudlow call “No Taxation Without Respiration.” So do yourself and your country a favor. If your Senator should come home without casting a final vote to permanently end the Death Tax, or if he should blabber about “compromise” measures, catch up with him in your home state during the recess. Tell him about Russia. Tell him about the additional 175,000 jobs per year that repealing the Death Tax will create, and the countless thousands of small businesses, family farms, and yes, local jobs which will be destroyed if they “compromise” or fail to act. Tell them you're watching. Tell them you're mad. And tell them we gave them the majority for a reason, and they darn well better deliver. But whatever you do, don't take this vote for granted. It still has to be won. And the outcome is very much in our hands. Author Archive | Contact Rod Martin -- Rod D. Martin is Founder and Chairman of TheVanguard.Org, America's conservative movement online. A writer, speaker and technology entrepreneur, he is a noted futurist and advocate for liberty who serves as Chairman of the Arlington Group's National Security Team, on the Board of Governors of the Council for National Policy, and as President of the National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA), “the Republican Wing of the Republican Party”.