The Democrat Party’s answer to virtually every issue in the country is a tax increase. From income taxes to corporate taxes to property taxes to sales taxes, Democrats have likely never seen a tax increase proposal they didn’t eagerly embrace. Toss in Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris and the sky’s the limit.
While Harris and the Democrats talk virtually non-stop about “the rich” not paying their fair share, and large corporations profiteering at the expense of hardworking Americans, they don’t talk nearly as much about their views on estate taxes — “death taxes” — and their desire to increase them, as well.
If Harris wins the presidential election, the question of how much is enough — or too much — to tax individual estates upon death will be front and center. Bigly.
According to the American Business Defense Foundation under Harris’ economic and tax plans, the number of Americans subject to the death tax would double or triple, primarily because she has repeatedly declared she will let the Trump tax cuts expire in 2025 if she becomes president.
Under Trump’s plan, which he signed into law on January 1, 2018, the amount of an estate that is currently exempt from tax is roughly $13.6 million. But according to the IRS, when Trump’s plan expires, “the exemption is due to revert to its pre-2018 level of $5 million, as adjusted for inflation.”
As Stephen Moore, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economic advisor to the Trump campaign, wrote in an op-ed published by Fox News on Saturday, Harris can’t wait:
Kamala wants this to happen. She wants to soak the millionaires and billionaires. But under her plan, thousands more families will be clobbered by this tax when a parent dies. This brings new meaning to the idea of “the grim reaper.”
We aren’t talking about the very rich — people like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, who are already subject to the unfair death tax. (Though these super billionaires have built massive family foundation tax shelters to escape the tax.)
Now many farms, ranches and family-owned businesses will have to be sold after a funeral just to pay the taxes. These are mostly owners and operators of small businesses that have been built up over a lifetime to million-dollar-plus enterprises. The owners have already paid Uncle Sam millions of dollars of income, property, payroll, energy, business and other taxes and annual levies.
Now they will have to pay a 40% estate tax rate, plus another 5 to 15% depending on what state they die in. In other words, roughly half of a family inheritance must be forked over to the politicians. The IRS gets almost as much as the kids and grandkids. The agents should at least pay their respect at the funeral!
“How is this fair?” Moore asked. It’s not — and it gets worse, as he wrote.
Enter, Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren
Warren, a non-declared, dyed-in-wool socialist, has introduced a bill to make the death tax even worse. Under her bill, the estate tax would not increase to as high as 55 percent to 65 percent; but the federal exemption would also lower to $3.5 million, which means as much as two-thirds of untold numbers of estates in the country could be legally stolen by the federal government and redistributed to people who had zero to do with earning it.
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Did I mention that Harris loves Warren’s bill?
So How Bad Could It Be?
If Warren’s plan should become the law of the land, likely under Harris as president, the United States would have the highest death tax rates in the world. As Moore explained:
Higher than Russia. Higher than China. Higher than the socialist nations of Europe.
The real-world impact of death taxes this high is that older people will avoid the death tax by lavishly spending down the family estate so that there is no money left to tax. The incentive is to die broke. Family businesses won’t be able to pass from one generation to the next. This is how the death tax destroys jobs and investment.
Moore legitimately asked: “Is the IRS going to seize grandma’s jewelry or grandpa’s stable of horses and the mansion he built himself?”
If Kamala Harris wins the White House, and the Democrat Party wins both chambers of Congress, the answer will be a resounding: “Of course they will. Eagerly so.”
