A Damn Shame That This Is A True Statement

What Passes For Good News

Oh that it were not so, but the truth is that no good news is coming out of congress, the White House, SCOTUS or practically any federal building these days. Does that mean our lives really suck or that our leaders really suck? I'll leave the answer to the question up to you.

But this NY Times editorial hammers the nail pretty well.

Any day in which the House or Senate refrains from doing something destructive is about as good as it gets in Washington lately. Yesterday, the Senate cleared that low bar when it rejected efforts to repeal the estate tax.

The nation is at war and the budget is so wildly out of balance that the government cannot pay its bills without borrowing money from foreign investors. The idea that this is a good moment to repeal a tax on people who inherit multimillion-dollar estates is mind-boggling. But Congress, pushed by the lobbying efforts of a handful of super-rich families, was on the brink of doing just that. The country was saved from that fate when the Senate fell three votes short of the 60 needed to prevent a filibuster by Democrats who were rightly horrified by the whole idea.

The senators who deserve the most credit for saving the day, however, were George Voinovich of Ohio and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Republicans who broke with their party to help block consideration of the repeal. Mr. Voinovich said, rightly, that the idea of eliminating the tax under current conditions was "incredibly irresponsible and intellectually dishonest."

Majority Leader Bill Frist, on the other hand, was the chief culprit. Mr. Frist appears convinced that the best way he can demonstrate his potential as a presidential candidate is to march the chamber through votes on all the most divisive and useless legislation moldering on the agenda — banning gay marriages, writing a prohibition of the nonexistent flag-burning problem into the Constitution, and eliminating a tax that applies only to the richest 1 percent of the population.

The estate tax certainly needs work. It currently exempts the first $4 million of a married couple's estate — or $2 million for an individual — and taxes anything beyond that at 46 percent. The exemptions go up to $3.5 million and $7 million by 2009, and the rate drops to 45 percent. Then in 2010, the tax is repealed entirely. In 2011 it reverts to 55 percent of everything over $1 million.

Congress could easily have rationalized the tax structure, while protecting small businesses and family farms. But that would have forced everyone to admit that there's nothing wrong with asking people to pay a tax when they inherit enormous fortunes. For this Senate, the bar doesn't go nearly that high.