Ray D. Madoff: Give Up on the Estate Tax
[Ray D. Madoff, a professor at Boston College Law School, is the author of “Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead.”]
...[The estate] tax, first enacted in 1916, was never intended to be simply a device for raising revenue. Rather, it was meant to address the phenomenon of a small number of Americans controlling large amounts of the country’s wealth — which was considered a national problem.
As Justice Louis Brandeis said, “We can have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few or we can have democracy, but we can’t have both.” Even Andrew Carnegie testified in Congress in favor of an estate tax as the best way to address wealth concentration.
In its first 60 years, the estate tax, along with other progressive policies, went a long way toward accomplishing this goal. By 1976, the amount of the nation’s wealth controlled by the richest 1 percent of Americans had fallen from more than 50 percent to only 20 percent. And this greater dispersal of wealth fostered a strong middle class.
The tax policies of the past 35 years, however, have reversed the trend. Today the wealthiest 1 percent own more than a third of the country’s wealth, leaving 80 percent of Americans with just 16 percent of it. President Obama’s proposal would only accelerate this trend....
Read entire article at NYT
...[The estate] tax, first enacted in 1916, was never intended to be simply a device for raising revenue. Rather, it was meant to address the phenomenon of a small number of Americans controlling large amounts of the country’s wealth — which was considered a national problem.
As Justice Louis Brandeis said, “We can have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few or we can have democracy, but we can’t have both.” Even Andrew Carnegie testified in Congress in favor of an estate tax as the best way to address wealth concentration.
In its first 60 years, the estate tax, along with other progressive policies, went a long way toward accomplishing this goal. By 1976, the amount of the nation’s wealth controlled by the richest 1 percent of Americans had fallen from more than 50 percent to only 20 percent. And this greater dispersal of wealth fostered a strong middle class.
The tax policies of the past 35 years, however, have reversed the trend. Today the wealthiest 1 percent own more than a third of the country’s wealth, leaving 80 percent of Americans with just 16 percent of it. President Obama’s proposal would only accelerate this trend....