Franken-Lies-And-the-Lying-Liars-Who-Tell

Funny thing happened at the end of the Senate debate on this issue. Republicans, who
knew they had the votes to win, kept spouting off about family farms and small businesses.
So the Democrats gave them a chance to prove their sincerity. Instead of abolishing the estate
tax altogether, how about exempting the first $4 million per couple? Nope. How 'bout the
first $8 million? Sorry.
Okay. Then how about this? Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, offered an
amendment that would exempt the first one hundred million dollars of a couple's net worth
before a penny of estate taxes were paid. This would exempt all "family farms" and "small
businesses" worth less than $100 million.
The amendment went down 48-51. 1
In all this talk, one thing that gets lost is that there are forty-two million working Americans
who have not gotten one cent in tax cuts. The Wall Street Journal refers to them as "lucky
duckies" because they earn so little that they don't pay any income taxes. Many lucky duckies
are deeply in debt to predatory lenders. Many of these lucky duckies couldn't afford college
and cannot afford health insurance. Some of these lucky duckies, working Americans, will be
homeless sometime during the year. Their children, the lucky ducklings, are far more likely
than my kids, or Paul Gigot's, to be killed violently or die of a preventable disease.
Apparently, the Wall Street journal thinks that the unluckiest thing in the world is
paying taxes.
That's why they have been such vociferous supporters of the Bush tax cuts, more than
half of which will eventually go to the top 1 percent of families.
In the last thirty years, those families saw their after-tax incomes rise 157 percent. The
top one percent have incomes starting at $230,000. Their share of the national income has
doubled, and is now as large as the combined income of the bottom 40 percent. The thirteen
thousand families at the very top have almost as much in come as the poorest twenty million
households in America, which is like the population of Bemidji, Minnesota, (home of Paul
Bunyan) having more income than the country's six largest cities—New York City, Los Angeles,
Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Phoenix—combined.
1
Kudos to Republicans who voted for the Feingold amendment: Chafee, Collins, Hutchison, McCain,
Snowe, and Specter. Huge raspberries to the Democrats who crossed over: Baucus, Breaux, Cleland, Lincoln,
Miller, Nelson of Florida, Nelson of Nebraska, and Wyden. Semi-kudos to Stevens of Alaska who did not vote.