Do we really have that many people who leave behind 2 million dollar estates in this state? While I agree that perhaps 2 million dollars is a bit low considering inflation, the estate tax fuels the creation of charitable foundations and organizations that fund a lot of the charitable work in this country. Avoiding creating a permanent overclass of Paris Hilton-like spoiled children is a nice side effect, too. The federal minimums for estate size, before an estate would have to pay a dollar of estate tax, btw, are $3.5 million and $7 million for single and joint couples respectively. Those numbers make more sense as limits, but I still don’t understand what the uproar about this tax is about… there’s nothing here that affects most people. I don’t understand how it’s a popular issue…
Newsweek’s Daniel Gross explains the Consumer Price Index (here’s the official BLS site) in a very simple video. I could do without the goofy sound effects, but it’s a good, 2 minute explanation of how the government tracks inflation.
Per David Simon’s Berkeley talk, though, the video doesn’t go into why this matters. Perhaps they’ll cover that in the next installment of the Economics 101 series.
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June 13th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
Conceptually, a lot of people probably see it as double taxation.