abcnews.go.com — While critics have dismissed Sarah Palin's "death panels" to dole out medical care as fiction, a tax loophole may in fact give some people a financial incentive to make this new year their last. In 2001, then-President George W. Bush signed a law designed to phase out the estate tax -- a tax on the assets a deceased individual leaves behind.
Jan 1, 2010 View in Crawl 4
stevanoskiJan 1, 2010
With Obamacare I feel comfortable predicting more deaths. Headline on Drudge is how the Mayo Clinic is no longer taking Medicare patients.<a class="user" href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&amp;sid=aHoYSI84VdL0" rel="nofollow">http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&am ...</a>
bille3Jan 2, 2010
Ok, I was with you up until the accusation Monsanto will buy the farms. I still give you a thumbs up on the rest of your comment. But as a side note I would like to see documentation that Monsanto is buying farms.Of all of the farms in California that went to auction or were sold a majority were sold to other farmers with strong credit leverage. Some of the farms were bought by individuals that were not farmers with more money than knowledge about farming and were looking for tax deductions.
bille3Jan 2, 2010
Lets call it what it really is; Death Tax. And it will return again in one short year.The two taxes that do the most to keep private industry and small business under the thumb of government is the Death Tax and the capital gains tax. Both siphon off capital from the hands of business and prevent it from being reinvested into the economy which provide jobs and cash flow.
raycheetahJan 2, 2010
This tax is nothing short of medieval. In those times, it was called "heriot:""It was the right of a lord in feudal Europe to seize a serf's best horse and or clothing upon his death. It arose from the tradition of the lord loaning a serf a horse or armour or weapons to fight so that when the serf died the lord would rightfully reclaim his property. When knights as a class emerged and were later able to acquire their own fighting instruments, the lord continued to claim rights to property upon death, extending sometimes to everyone not just the fighting knights. Serfs could make provisions for heriot in their wills, but death in battle often meant no heriot was required, because the winner of a fight would often take horse and armour anyway as was often the custom. By the 13th century the payment was made either in money or in kind by handing over the best beast or chattel of the tenant. The enlightened cleric Jacques de Vitry called lords who imposed heriots 'vultures that prey upon death... worms feeding upon the corpse.'" (from the Wiki)That last quote is particularly telling, as is the description of the evolution of the heriot custom. Looks like Uncle Sam really wants to be Feudal Lord Sam.I thought the US broke away from England to put an end to this sort of thing? ='[.]'=