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JamieGottliebFirstPaper 6 - 11 Aug 2009 - Main.EbenMoglen
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Community, Class and the Estate Tax
Economically Perverse Opposite to the Estate Tax: A Conventional Account | |
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- I think you meant "Opposition," but it's hard for me to believe you could have failed to proofread so completely. So maybe I'm missing something?
| | | The estate tax is a tool that combats the dynastic concentration of wealth within a small subset of society while raising revenues that fund important government social services. It has always been levied only upon the estates of the highest-income individuals, and yet the majority of middle and low-income Americans have in the past opposed it, thus undermining their own economic self-interest. | |
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- I think you mean "have recently opposed it." And I don't think you mean the majority of low-income Americans oppose the estate tax; I've seen no data that suggests that. Whether "middle-income" Americans "oppose the estate tax" depends on how you define middle-income and how you ask the question. So maybe this is an essay about polling variance?
| | | One conventional explanation for this opposition has been a variant of the “pure mystical idealism” that Arnold attributes to subjects in a capitalist society: the rags-to-riches American Dream narrative that supposedly drives every Americans to view the structure of society through the eyes of a millionaire. Others point to a more practical problem of imperfect information; Larry Bartels cites a 2003 survey in which over 50% of respondents drastically overestimated the number of Americans subject to the estate tax, while David Brooks cites a figure of 19% of Americans who believe themselves to be in the wealthiest 1% of the population. Yet neither forsaking the notion of the American Dream nor acquiring more complete information seems to eliminate economically perverse opposition to the tax. Bartels found that even people with a proper understanding of the scope of the estate tax and an accurate perception of the current trend toward increasing economic stratification were nevertheless “no less likely than less-informed citizens to support repealing the estate tax.”
Another View: America-as-Community | | | Secondary arguments aside, however, the partial resurrection of American class-consciousness that has accompanied the finance crisis provides the most favorable conditions in recent memory for the positive reception of the estate tax. Within such a frame, the political perspective of those who will strictly benefit from the funds generated by the estate tax may become aligned with their economic interests without demanding that they relinquish a community vision of America. | |
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- This isn't really a paper about why Americans tell pollsters they believe things that it would be to their class advantage not to believe. But it isn't really an essay about anything else. I don't know whether some people believe what David Brooks believes most Americans believe, but if I were a Republican I would want to believe what David Brooks believes about Americans in pretty much the way that if I were poor I would want to believe in the possibility of growing rich. Either way the issue isn't what people tell pollsters about the estate tax, it's what the tax law says about what happens to your money when you die. And the story of the estate tax, in that regard, is pretty much the same as what happened to income
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- we abandoned progressivity in the last generation, and gave immense advantages to the very rich about which everyone other than the very rich was ill-informed. That will now change. Rhetoric on the subject isn't very interesting, and the essay, much as it needs further revising, has to cope with that rather serious problem.
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