Wright Bryan recently published a new article How We Got From Estate Tax to "Death Tax" on December 13, 2010 at NPR.
President Teddy Roosevelt got the estate tax in its current form through Congress in 1916, just three years after the start of the federal income tax. Roosevelt supported the tax as an instrument for enforcing the equality of opportunity in the U.S. by making it more difficult to pass great fortunes from one generation to another. Graetz says that the public accepted the tax as a another progressive-era reform. But the 1990s saw a resurgence in efforts to kill the tax, with an emphasis on how it affects family farms and small businesses. The estate tax has rarely affected these types of small family operations and that opponents eventually fell back to the position of advocating a complete repeal. The debate over the tax seems more symbolic than anything else in light of the fact that it has never produced more than 2 percent of federal revenues in any individual year since World War II.
President Teddy Roosevelt got the estate tax in its current form through Congress in 1916, just three years after the start of the federal income tax. Roosevelt supported the tax as an instrument for enforcing the equality of opportunity in the U.S. by making it more difficult to pass great fortunes from one generation to another. Graetz says that the public accepted the tax as a another progressive-era reform. But the 1990s saw a resurgence in efforts to kill the tax, with an emphasis on how it affects family farms and small businesses. The estate tax has rarely affected these types of small family operations and that opponents eventually fell back to the position of advocating a complete repeal. The debate over the tax seems more symbolic than anything else in light of the fact that it has never produced more than 2 percent of federal revenues in any individual year since World War II.
Click here to read the entire article.
Posted by Yi Song, Associate Editor, Wealth Strategies Journal.
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