Sep 4
Janet Daley on Death Tax
Janet Daley, who of late has rather lost her luster with her republicanism, has written a corker of a piece on death tax. She has quite accutely set out the nastiness of the death tax and how it affects different types of relationships when one or the other dies. The killer quote is this one.
In effect, inheritance tax is a punishment for unselfishness: those who save throughout their lives will ensure their descendants are penalised, while those who spend all that they have on themselves will leave behind no debt to the state…This is the most pernicious aspect of the “high tax, high spend” economic philosophy in which public money is inherently virtuous and private money inevitably wicked.
She quite rightly rounds on the Tory Party and George Osborne MP for its complete lack of courage over the issue. The fact the Tory Party is not soundly behind the abolition of the death tax is a very bad sign indeed. It is even more worrying for leading Tories to express the notion that those who want to get rid of the death tax are only ones who are wealthy.
I personally believe that the death tax is immoral and quite frankly evil. It is Marxist politics of envy at its absolute worse and no one sensible should have any truck with it. Its not a tax on inheriting its a tax on dying.
1 Comment so far
The burden of the death tax falls on the following:
- ordinary families who expend needed funds on solicitor and accountant fees to plan around the death tax whether or not they may actually be in line for it.
- ordinary employees of small businesses when the owners wind up the small business as part of planning for death tax and the employees lose their jobs.
- ordinary employees of small business whose owners opt to sell to plan around the death tax problems the business will create for their decendents. Often the employees lose their jobs with the sale.
- people who favour wildlife and undeveloped land because the death tax frequently causes sale of family land to pay death taxes resulting in development of the land
- everyone, because the death tax is actually an additional tax on top of the tax that was paid year by year on all earnings, profits and gains. At death the death tax is levied on the total of the funds and possession acquired with the funds left after the yearly tax bite.
In a word, the death tax is the worst sort of stealth tax…as death comes so doth the tax man. They stand hand in hand at the bedside of the elderly, beside the fatal road accident, at the bottom of the cliff awaiting the suicide. The two spectres are there….
Mater