Property is taxed every year, regardless of whether it produces income. If you happen to sell property for more than you paid for it, you are taxed on the gain. It is a wonder anyone has anything left at the end of a life of taxation. If you do, the government is first in line to take one more bite. .
Studies have shown that the death tax is not helping our economy in any way. In a study done by The Center for the Study of Taxation, it was determined that if gift, estate, death and generation-skipping taxes had been repealed in 1971, by the year 1991 there would have been 262,000 more jobs, $46.3 billion more in GDP and $398.6 billion more in capital. .
It seems that this tax, which causes so much trouble for farmers and other small-business owners, amounts to less than 1% of total federal revenues. And, according to economists, it is not an easy tax to collect. Enforcement and compliance costs alone eat up 65 cents for every dollar collected. This seems like a great deal of time and money spent on collecting a tax which does not bring in that much anyway.
The estate tax is not only insulting, it is unfair. Those with the greatest wealth and those who have held wealth the longest, can usually figure out ways to avoid or minimize the estate tax by setting up trusts or hiding it in the stock market. Instead, it falls hardest on smaller enterprises; people who started with nothing and never expected to be subjected to the tax. Farmers cannot hide their money like the rich, as the vast majority of their income every year is put right back into their farms.
For most of these farms and businesses, wealth is seldom held in cash or other liquid assets. The real problem occurs when much of what has been left behind is in the form of land, buildings, livestock and equipment instead of cold, hard cash. And since the IRS prefers greenbacks to combines, many farm families and other small businesses have to sell off what makes the operation run in order to gain the liquid assets needed for the tax man.
They set their prison on fire and died within its flames. ... Now they were also without homes and with children to care for when already they were prisoners of the punishing regimen of walking. ... Taxed beyond their limits, one by one they succumbed. ... Neither death, nor illness, nor pleas for rest slowed the caravans of death. ... It must inflict death. ...
The Physiocrats were a small band of followers of the French physician Francois Quesnay, whose economic prescriptions included reduced taxes, less regulation, the elimination of government-granted monopolies and internal tolls and tariffs, ideas that found their rallying cry in the famous slogan, laissez-faire, laissez-passer." ... Promising the guards safe-conduct if they would surrender, the leaders of the mob broke their word and hacked them to death. ... In the spring of 1792, the First Committee of Public Safety was established, charged with judging and punishing traitors. ... Soon a prog...
Since the Civil War, much of the concern over civil rights in the United States has focused on efforts to extend these rights fully to African Americans. Resistance to racial segregation and discrimination with strategies such as civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance, marches, protests, boycotts...
