"Much of the money that wealthy heirs inherit would never face any taxation were it not for the estate tax. In fact, that’s one reason why policymakers created the estate tax in 1916: to serve as a backstop to the income tax, taxing the income of wealthy taxpayers that would otherwise go completely untaxed.
Under the current tax system, capital gains tax is due on the appreciation of assets, such as real estate, stock, or an art collection, only when the owner “realizes” the gain (usually by selling the asset). Therefore, the increase in the value of an asset is never subject to income tax if the owner holds on to the asset until death.
These unrealized capital gains account for a significant proportion of the assets held by estates — ranging from 32 percent for estates worth between $5 million and $10 million to as much as about 55 percent of the value of estates worth more than $100 million. (See Figure 4.)
The estate tax also serves as a modest corrective to other tax rules that provide massive tax benefits to income from wealth, such as the fact that capital gains are taxed at lower rates than wages and salaries. The top 0.1 percent of taxpayers — those with incomes above $3.1 million — will receive 56 percent of the benefit of the preferential capital gains rates in 2017, worth more than $600,000 apiece. Other tax rules allow part of the income of the very wealthiest to go completely untaxed, even with the estate tax.
Since the estate tax serves, in part, to tax capital gains that have not otherwise been taxed, some people have proposed taxing estates at the top capital gains rate, currently 23.8 percent. This argument is flawed: the capital gains tax rates typically apply to nearly all capital gains income, whereas the estate tax applies only to the part of an estate that exceeds the exemption level. (The estate tax’s average effective rate of 17 percent in 2017 is below the capital gains rate.) "
"Crimes are statutory things and the criminal statutes are published on the internet. Generally speaking, the criminal law doesn't speak of "collusion", the legal term of art is "conspiracy". Conspiracy is pretty much the same in terms of penalty as the crime itself.
In terms of right to know, Trump has a basic problem. For the first time in his life perhaps, Donald Trump is an employee. In this new and unfamiliar role, Trump hasn't seemed to grasp that his scope for keeping secrets from the people he works for is highly limited. Nor does he seem to understand that there isn't anybody around him who is under any personal obligation to keep his secrets for him.
Trump gives every appearance of thinking "leaking" is illegal, which it hardly ever is. Anyone, both inside and the outside of the White House in this free country is free to give their version of events to any reporter that person chooses to. In Trump's business world he prevented that by making everyone sign confidentiality agreements. Nobody he works with now has signed such an agreement." Hiram
"Agreed. That is why Trump had Comey fired.
Comey was a centrist who worked for the USA.
Trump wants people that are "loyal to him".
Of course that is hard to find in a Public Institution." G2A
"Trump fired Comey because Comey was pressing the Russian investigation.
Trump still thinks in terms of loyalty. He is mad at some Republican senators because they weren't loyal. He really hasn't figured out that members of Congress don't work for him. His desire for loyalty helps to explain the nepotism, the need he feels to surround himself with family members".--Hiram
"The IPCC uses four different "Representative Concentration Pathways," (replacing the complex set of "scenarios" i.e. assumptions about what the future will bring) as far as human emissions are concerned. They make assumptions about population, economic growth, energy requirements and production, "carbon intensity" of that energy, etc. LOTS of assumptions, and put them in 4 general categories: RCP 8.5, 6.0, 4.5, and 2.6. [as I understand it, named after the "old" predictions of temperature rise for each] The 100-year warming predicted, based on those RCPs, range from 0.3 to 4.8 degrees C. [You see why I say their predictive value is worthless?] They then have a "standard" computer tool called MAGICC, which quickly calculates the results of any change to basic parameters, rather than run thousands of hours of computer calculations.Now what one has to remember is that this Lomborg is a Political Science major who has been dubbed dishonest and unqualified. Here is a description of the RCPs and the graphed results.
Read Lomborg's paper and you find that he used RCP 8.5 (the "business as usual" scenario) and MAGICC to get his answers, the same thing other researchers have done, and achieved the same result-- that Paris doesn't matter because human CO2 is relatively insignificant, as I have shown using very simple math. You can do it with the lower emissions scenarios-- 6.0, etc.-- but of course the impact of adding Paris is even smaller.
You simply have to get to the point where you believe the actual math rather than the hyperventilating politicians with vested interests in keeping this scare going. Even some of them will very quietly admit that Paris "doesn't do much" by itself and that "much more is needed" to keep temperature rise below 2 degrees (an increase many consider beneficial). Why should that be, when the average of the 100-year climate models is now 2.5 degrees and falling (because of better understanding of "climate sensitivity," for one thing), and is still above simple projections of the historical record?" Jerry
"It definitely does sound like juicy political intrigue, I wonder if any of it was illegal? I guess we will see what Mueller's investigation determines.
Kind of like we did when Clinton purposefully kept her business emails off the business server for questionable reasons.
I keep thinking I will be reusing the old Clinton post title with a new set of names...
"Trump Etal is Irresponsible / Negligent, Not Criminal"
I agree that the Trump etal folks are worse than Clinton, I just don't where illegal starts for Private citizens meeting with foreign parties." G2A
Campaign finance law prohibits the soliciting, accepting, or receiving contributions or donations -- which include in-kind contributions such as research -- from a foreign national.
If there's more where this came from, there could also be (at minimum) a conspiracy case related to election fraud. " Sean
"Nothing I read lately on healthcare interests me enough to share or comment, but something I read on climate change does. There is this from K.Drum:
Our Approach to Climate Change Isn’t Working. Let’s Try Something Else.
I don't have the energy right now to read the Doom's day link Drum's post references. But here it is for people here to also ignore, as this topic never gets much interest here except from Jerry:
The Uninhabitable Earth Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think.
"Healthcare requires money. Well said, but it makes the glaringly erroneous assumption that the only way to deliver health care is exactly the way it is done today. As I've said before, four changes would reduce our total costs by about 50% without affecting quality. So should we NOT do those things, just because we might be able to lower taxes for somebody? I'm not understanding the reasoning, here. It looks like an attempt to keep a political argument alive, regardless of what the "right thing to do" might be. " JerryI asked him to provide them and here are the answers.
"Actually, they aren't mine; they come from a Mayo study many years ago. They are:
- Eliminate first dollar coverage. Every use of the system costs /something/ (a copay, IOW).
- Eliminate fee-for-service. This is the big one. Rather than doing what is the quickest and best treatment, doctors are led to do what pays the best or, more likely, to add on something unnecessary just to cover their costs.
- Eliminate third-party payers. Forget single-payer. Everybody pays their own fees or buys insurance on their own. If they get a stipend or a tax credit to do so, that's their own affair.
- Eliminate defensive medicine. The malpractice system is out of control and drives up costs, not directly, but indirectly.
To that we should add, now, deregulation of the health insurance industry. If I want, I should be able to buy a "catastrophic only" policy, or open an HSA or "prepaid care account," without government telling me I can't."We just have a whole lot of well paid people in the system." G2A"And yet that marketplace is badly distorted by government regulation. Medicare tells doctors they can only get, say, $250 for an appendectomy (I have no idea, but) the doctor doesn't make a penny unless he charges at least $500. So he makes it up somewhere else or refuses to do it. If the doctor could charge, say $550, he might get "rich," but do we really want to hire the low-cost bidder for something like that?
And by law, all insurance companies in Minnesota are "non-profit." Why would anybody get into that business?In fact, the whole idea seems illogical to me. If we had a free (or mostly free) market in health care, prices would be set by the millions of individual choices and implicit contracts made between providers and patients-- sellers and buyers. The best and/or scarcest goods and services would make those providers "rich" and everybody else would enter the market at the point where they saw a beneficial exchange, or exit the business for lack of business. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. " Jerry
"Congressional GOP messaging about what the final product would deliver ran up most rudely not against Democrats' objections, or protesters at town hall meetings, but the most powerful Republican of them all: the President. Throughout his campaign, Trump promised, vaguely but consistently, that his health care plan would cover more people and -- crucially now -- not mess with Medicaid.
"We're going to have insurance for everybody," he told The Washington Post days before taking office in January. "There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can't pay for it, you don't get it. That's not going to happen with us."
The realities of governing -- and doing it in concert with Republican lawmakers -- always suggested otherwise, and the House negotiations illustrated that it was plainly impossible. Not long after celebrating the House bill's passage alongside Ryan and the GOP conference, Trump doubled back to describe the legislation as "mean.""
"You don't get it---your definition of what a "good citizen" is and what "successful" is are not the same as most of the people here. Your definitions seem to be mostly centered around money and money accumulation as the main measure of worth of a person. Further, the idea that your definitions of those terms is how you want to divide society into the "deserving" and "undeserving" columns is unpalatable to those same people." NealWhat I find fascinating is the Liberal belief that the GOP is trying to "punish people into compliance" somehow by "not giving them free stuff and services" that is paid for with additional taxes on other citizens that are required to be paid?
"What's interesting is the idea that the function of Government in a democracy is to "herd" citizens. Again, your problem is that your notions of capability, responsibility, and self sufficiency are not universally accepted. I keep saying one of the primary characteristics of the reactionary conservative mindset is a rejection of democratic society on a basic level. For all their chatter about individual rights and responsibilities at the end of the day the Republican agenda isn't about participating in the democratic process, it's about capturing the levers of government and using them to force everyone into compliance." Paul
"What does it reveal about Republican preferences? What it reveals about their character and moral fiber is more to the point." Steven
I'd say that the key attribute to their character is an overwhelming desire for conformity to a rigid "moral" standard for which they have christened themselves as the final arbitrator. Their preference is authoritarian in nature and punitive to anyone that doesn't fit their definition of what a productive member of society is." Ian
"I wish I'd written that. Can I copy it and just paste in the future whenever this discussion arises? :)" Paul
"What is your definition? Mine is centered around what is good for the USA (ie our society):If anything it seems to me that the Liberals are trying to force American citizens to comply with their beliefs regarding what a "good citizen" is... Unfortunately they seem to have only one requirement:
- Makes good use of society's investment in their education. (ie graduates HS and is proficient academically)
- Obeys the laws of our country (ie drugs, immigration, other)
- Gets financially stable before having children, only has the number of children they are capable of caring for themselves. (ie don't require additional investment from society)
- Both Parents are actively involved in the support and raising of the children. Ensure kids are fed, learn and mature to become good citizens.
- Continues life long learning, works, volunteers, gives to charity, etc to help themselves and our country be all we can be.
Do these seem unrealistic? Rationale?" G2A
