estate tax good...

…entrenched, inbred oligarchies bad.

Three paragraphs in Nick Kristof’s NYT op-ed on CEO pay illustrate why ‘moneyed’ does not equal ‘deserving’ or ‘accomplished.’

These Brobdingnagian paychecks are partly the result of taxpayer subsidies. A study released a few weeks ago by the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington found five major elements in the tax code that encourage overpaying executives. These cost taxpayers more than $20 billion a year.

That’s enough money to deworm every child in the world, cut maternal mortality around the globe by two-thirds and also provide iodized salt to prevent tens of millions of children from suffering mild retardation or worse. Alternatively, it could pay for health care for most uninsured children in America.

And,

…boards [of directors] pay C.E.O.’s after negotiations that are often more like pillow talk. Relationships are incestuous, and compensation consultants provide only a thin veneer of respectability by finding some “peer group” of companies so moribund that anybody shines in comparison. The result is what critics call the Lake Wobegon effect, which miraculously leaves all C.E.O.’s above average. Indeed, one study of 1,500 companies found that two-thirds claimed to be outperforming their peer groups.

It’s easy for ‘death tax’ haters to sway the public’s opinion on this issue with semantics (‘death tax’ on its own a genius bit of framing – hardly anyone has an estate but everyone dies) because most of us harbor the hope that one day it will be us in the top whatever percent of the country financially, and the suspicion that even if we’re not, the IRS will come for our paltry savings when we die and give it to crack-addicted, atheistic, single mothers of seven or other welfare queens.

The facts are, though, that your estate will almost definitely not qualify. (Mine undoubtedly will thanks to my many wonderful invention ideas that I haven’t yet monetized but surely will.) Sorry.

One other tidbit, from Wikipedia:

In July 2006, the IRS confirmed that it planned to cut the jobs of 157 of the agency’s 345 estate tax lawyers, plus 17 support personnel, by October 1, 2006. Kevin Brown, an IRS deputy commissioner, said that he had ordered the staff cuts because far fewer people were obliged to pay estate taxes than in the past.

Estate tax lawyers are the most productive tax law enforcement personnel at the I.R.S., according to Brown. For each hour they work, they find an average of $2,200 of taxes that people owe the government.