When I saw "the Deaths of Four People Cost the U.S. Government $6.5 Billion" I imagined the government taking 6.5 billion from taxpayers and spending it extremely inefficiently. But I am not a journalist living in New York City (if the blogger wrote the headline or an editor for the New York Times if an editor wrote the headline of the blog post)! What the headline is really talking about is the government's failing to collect death taxes that it could have collected if Congress had voted differently.
So apparently according to this journalist every time the government fails to collect X dollars that it could have collected through the legitimate operation of elections, Congressional votes, etc, that failure "costs" the government X dollars. I am having trouble escaping the implication that the headline writer believes that any money that Congress could have voted to collect rightfully belongs to the government, and if the money remains in private hands, maybe that is worth a blog post in the New York Times!
Hi, can we please stop using the phrase "death tax"? It's called estate tax. Legally. Calling it a death tax does not change any of the underlying mechanics or reasons to support/oppose it.
Let's say you are running a business which sells FooWidgets and you charge $100 for them.
Then for the holidays, you decide to only sell them for $50 each.
Doesn't the $50 in savings which you are passing on to your customers also represent $50 in potential revenue that you are not collecting, since you decided to be generous?
Really poor title for the NY Times. The deaths didn't cause the government to lose money. It's not the government's money to begin with, it's the property of the people who died.
It's distressing to see the country's premier newspaper resort to linkbait.
I'm pretty sure Dubner posts these without review, so it's really his wording, not anything attributable to the NYT.
It's not the government's money to begin with, it's the property of the people who died.
This is one (perfectly valid) model of property. Another would include the fact that the institutions that make the ownership of a baseball team or oil corporation feasible (stock markets, banking, legal courts, law enforcement) exist because of the social contract the person entered by deciding to live in the US. Estate taxes (or death taxes, if you wish) are the other side of that social contract: when you die wealthy, you have to pay your dues to the society which made accumulation (or maintenance) of wealth possible.
The amounts in question are tax revenue that the government would have collected in other years which were not collected this year due to the one-year-only-exemption.
How is missed revenue opportunity not lost money?
The question comes down to semantics of how you interpret a missed chance at revenue, we can probably leave the question of the fairness of the inheritance tax out of it (for now).
You can say it's the property of the people who died if you have an ancient Egyptian view of the afterlife. Everybody else says you can't take it with you. What happens to someone's former property after death is a public policy question.
And meanwhile, the government spent over a trillion dollars more in FY 2009 than it had received in revenue.
Over half of government spending is in three areas that will not be touched by members of either party: Defense, Social Security, and Medicare & Medicaid.
Whining about the loss of a piddly $6.5 billion one year is like going on about cutting pork or "waste" - a demonstration that one wants to appeal to peoples' anxieties about unsustainable government spending while being utterly uninterested in doing anything about the problem.
[+] [-] sielskr|15 years ago|reply
So apparently according to this journalist every time the government fails to collect X dollars that it could have collected through the legitimate operation of elections, Congressional votes, etc, that failure "costs" the government X dollars. I am having trouble escaping the implication that the headline writer believes that any money that Congress could have voted to collect rightfully belongs to the government, and if the money remains in private hands, maybe that is worth a blog post in the New York Times!
[+] [-] jbooth|15 years ago|reply
Signed, George Orwell
[+] [-] brown9-2|15 years ago|reply
Then for the holidays, you decide to only sell them for $50 each.
Doesn't the $50 in savings which you are passing on to your customers also represent $50 in potential revenue that you are not collecting, since you decided to be generous?
[+] [-] forgotAgain|15 years ago|reply
It's distressing to see the country's premier newspaper resort to linkbait.
[+] [-] andreyf|15 years ago|reply
I'm pretty sure Dubner posts these without review, so it's really his wording, not anything attributable to the NYT.
It's not the government's money to begin with, it's the property of the people who died.
This is one (perfectly valid) model of property. Another would include the fact that the institutions that make the ownership of a baseball team or oil corporation feasible (stock markets, banking, legal courts, law enforcement) exist because of the social contract the person entered by deciding to live in the US. Estate taxes (or death taxes, if you wish) are the other side of that social contract: when you die wealthy, you have to pay your dues to the society which made accumulation (or maintenance) of wealth possible.
[+] [-] brown9-2|15 years ago|reply
The amounts in question are tax revenue that the government would have collected in other years which were not collected this year due to the one-year-only-exemption.
How is missed revenue opportunity not lost money?
The question comes down to semantics of how you interpret a missed chance at revenue, we can probably leave the question of the fairness of the inheritance tax out of it (for now).
[+] [-] brlewis|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Semiapies|15 years ago|reply
Over half of government spending is in three areas that will not be touched by members of either party: Defense, Social Security, and Medicare & Medicaid.
Whining about the loss of a piddly $6.5 billion one year is like going on about cutting pork or "waste" - a demonstration that one wants to appeal to peoples' anxieties about unsustainable government spending while being utterly uninterested in doing anything about the problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget
[+] [-] TGJ|15 years ago|reply
The government is supposed to be for the benefit of the citizen not the other way around.
[+] [-] khafra|15 years ago|reply