Legislative proposals

UFE's partners in estate tax advocacy, Robert Rubin and Julian Robertson, urge Wall Street Journal readers to demand that Congress brings back the estate tax.

Abigail Disney, filmmaker, philanthropist and friend of UFE, shares the story of how government and taxation made her family's good fortune possible in USA Today.

As year-end approaches, the debate over the expiring Bush tax cuts is getting messy and harder to tolerate. Part of the reason is that there are more than just the usual suspects trying to advance clearly terrible proposals.

Sarabeth Guthberg at 1115.org had me squinting at her blistering critique of claims made by political advisor/economist Mark Zandi. (He had it coming.) As a key advisor to House Speaker Pelosi, Zandi is trying to rally support for permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts benefiting the "middle class," and a one-year-but-not-really extension of the tax breaks for those earning more than $250,000 per year (roughly the top 2%). He says it's necessary because the recovery is still too fragile, and that even the richest Americans "may be sensitive." (And, we wouldn't wanna make anyone cry, right?)

Experts from different sides of the board, including Paul Krugman and Alan Greenspan, have sounded off, saying the Republican proposal to permanently extend all of the Bush tax cuts is a bad idea. The tab for such a move would run up to around $3.7 trillion over 10 years. Read more >>

Photo h/t wsws.org

This August, President Obama signed into law a bill that would save more than 300,000 jobs in teaching and public service. Amidst this Great Recession, that seems like a no-brainer, but it turned out to be one of the more controversial bills of the summer. Republican demands that the bill be deficit-neutral led to the shifting of $26 billion (half the House's intended allocation) away from food stamp and green jobs programs to fund the initiative.

This resulted in an outpouring of negative media coverage: public employees called “fat cats” and federal aid to states labeled “another sloth-encouraging bailout." One headline even likened this effort to preserve teaching jobs to theft: “Robbing Renewable Energy to Pay Teachers.”

All this haggling was over $26 billion. $26 BILLION! That's, by any standard, a sizable amount. But, compared to the nearly $137 billion Congress has allocated to the largely unpopular Iraq and Afghan wars in this fiscal year, or the $680 billion it could cost to extend the Bush tax cuts for the top 2% of households over the next decade, it's peanuts. Read more >>

Jim Amaral, owner of Maine's Borealis Breads, slams conservatives' misappropriation of small businesspeople as poster puppets against the estate tax. He tells us why they're dead wrong.

Working as an intern at United for a Fair Economy (UFE) has helped me realize that taxes, economic policy and government play vital roles in improving our communities. UFE warns against and strives to dilute concentrated wealth and power. They work on a national scale to promote progressive economic policies that can enable all levels of government to invest in the common good, and support a grassroots economic justice movement that can bring those policies to fruition.

When we zoom in to see what's happening at the local level, in too many areas we're finding that community development remains stagnant, including in our own, Boston. Here, local decision-makers continue to place the interests of monied special interests above the needs of most residents – especially those in underdeveloped neighborhoods. Here's a snapshot of what we've been dealing with...  Read more >>

An Iowan small businessperson and estate tax proponent provides historical context and passionate narrative in defense of the tax on inherited wealth.

As several ultra-wealthy Americans have passed on this year, the whirlwind of arguments both for and against the estate tax has grown in magnitude. Uncertainty over the tax, according to an estate planning lawyer, has many people "in a holding pattern." But, the greater concern is lost revenue and a tightening vice on the federal budget.

Heiress and estate tax advocate, Abigail Disney, is quoted in The Boston Globe, stating that her family's success was the direct result not only of hard work and innovation, but also of public investments.

Well, we can say that there is at least one good egg in the Senate. Bernie Sanders called out the hypocrisy of the born again deficit hawks who – just nine years ago – were telling us that “deficits don’t matter." Two wars, two huge sets of tax cuts and a spate of record setting debt accumulation later, we are now in a hole that only leaders as outspoken and honest as Sanders can get us out of.

His recently proposed Responsible Estate Tax Act would be a great way to raise much needed revenue in a way that would only affect multi-millionaires and billionaires. The so-called deficit hawks seem to have a problem with it.