{"id":2118,"date":"2009-12-31T13:41:03","date_gmt":"2009-12-31T21:41:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/?p=2118"},"modified":"2009-12-31T13:43:05","modified_gmt":"2009-12-31T21:43:05","slug":"time-of-death-january-1-2010-1201-am","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/time-of-death-january-1-2010-1201-am\/","title":{"rendered":"Time of death: January 1, 2010, 12:01 am"},"content":{"rendered":"

That’s what a statistically improbable number of death certificates are likely to read due to our tax law.\u00a0 No one will be able to prove which of the death certificates were fudged, or which doctors might have been fogging up the mirror for their patients until the magic hour struck.\u00a0 But there is no question about how powerful the incentives will be<\/a> for perhaps dozens of would-be beneficiaries of congressional ineptitude.<\/p>\n

Congress has allowed the estate tax to be completely repealed.\u00a0 Over 90 percent of Congress did not want this result.\u00a0 Virtually none of the Democrats wanted the wealthy to have any shot at keeping all their money in the family.\u00a0 The mere thought makes your fainting liberal…well, faint.\u00a0 Even a majority of Republicans were willing to keep an estate tax around, as long as it was something less than confiscatory.\u00a0 And it’s not like Congress didn’t have plenty of warning<\/a> to do something about it.\u00a0 Like 10 years.\u00a0 This is the kind of failure that in the private sector would have gotten someone fired, for sure.\u00a0 The congressmen involved will most likely be reelected.<\/p>\n

But Congress will not simply recognize its incompetence and let the law be the law.\u00a0 It’s not:\u00a0 “Hey, we screwed up on the estate tax.\u00a0 We guess we’ll have to figure out how to fix the mess we created later.”\u00a0 No.\u00a0 They are doubling down on their fecklessness by threatening to make their “fix” retroactive, making the mess even messier.<\/p>\n

That’s right.\u00a0 Congress is telling law-abiding taxpayers with a straight face<\/a>, “Sure, the law says that your estates will be exempt from tax in 2010.\u00a0 And we know that you selfish slobs will plan accordingly in order to deprive us of your hard-earned cash to the extent allowed by the law, you unpatriotic wretches.\u00a0 But don’t spend too much on that party, fair shitizens.\u00a0 When we’ve fixed the law to our satisfaction on our unhurried timetable, we will reach back into the past to take your money away.\u00a0 Don’t like it?\u00a0 Tell it to the justices.”<\/p>\n

That’s the way I’m hearing it.\u00a0 How about you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That’s what a statistically improbable number of death certificates are likely to read due to our tax law.\u00a0 No one will be able to prove which of the death certificates were fudged, or which doctors might have been fogging up the mirror for their patients until the magic hour struck.\u00a0 But there is no question […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,9],"tags":[64],"class_list":["post-2118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-unintended-consequences","tag-ex-post-what"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2118"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2121,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2118\/revisions\/2121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}