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Mr. Obama’s Most Recent “2%” Sellout is his Worst Yet
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Mr. Obama’s Most Recent “2%” Sellout is his Worst Yet
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Courtesy of Michael Hudson
Now that President Obama is almost celebrating his willingness to renew the tax cuts enacted under George Bush for the super-rich ten years ago, it is time for Democrats to ask themselves how strongly they are willing to oppose an administration that looks increasingly like Bush-Cheney III. Is this what they expected by his promise of an end to partisan politics?
It is a reflection of how one-sided today’s class war has become that Warren Buffet has quipped that “his” side is winning without a real fight being waged. No gauntlet has been thrown down over the trial balloon that the president and his advisor David Axelrod have sent up over the past two weeks to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% for “just” two more years. For all practical purposes the euphemism “two years” means forever – at least, long enough to let the super-rich siphon off enough more money to bankroll enough more Republicans to be elected to make the tax cuts permanent.
Mr. Obama seems to be campaigning for his own defeat! Thanks largely to the $13 trillion Wall Street bailout – while keeping the debt overhead in place for America’s “bottom 98%” – this happy 2% of the population now receives an estimated three quarters (~75%) of the returns to wealth (interest, dividends, rent and capital gains). This is nearly double what it received a generation ago – while the rest of the population has been squeezed, and foreclosure time has now arrived.
One would not realize that the financial End Time is here from today’s non-confrontational White House happy-talk. Charles Baudelaire quipped that the devil wins at the point where he manages convince the world that he doesn’t exist. We might paraphrase this today by saying that the financial elites win the class war at the point where voters believe it doesn’t exist – and believe that Mr. Obama is trying to help the middle class, not reduce it to debt peonage and a generation of victimhood as the economy settles into debt deflation.
The first pretense is that “two years” will get us through the current debt-induced depression. The Republican plan is to make more Congressional and Senate gains in 2012 as Mr. Obama’s former supporters “vote with their backsides” and stay home, as they did earlier this month. Why vote for a politician who promises “change” but this is merely an exclamation mark for the Bush-Cheney policies from Afghanistan and Iraq to Wall Street’s Democratic Leadership Council – the party’s right wing, one of whose leaders was Mr. Obama’s own beloved Senate mentor Joe Lieberman. So “two years” means forever in politician-talk.
The second pretense is cutting taxes for the super-rich is a trade-off to get Republican support for extending the tax cuts on the middle class. It is as if the Democrats already have lost their plurality in Congress. It’s all “to create jobs,” headed by employment of shipyard workers building yachts for the nouveau riches and foreclosing on the ten million Americans whose mortgage payments have fallen into arrears. It sounds Keynesian – or at least, reminiscent of Thomas Robert Malthus’s claim (as lobbyist for Britain’s landed aristocracy) that landlords would use their rental collection to hire footmen, carriage-makers and butlers to keep the economy going.
It gets worse. Mr. Obama’s “Bush” tax cut is Part I of his one-two punch program to shift taxes onto the middle class that elected him. Congressional economists have estimated that extending the tax cuts to the top 2% will cost $700 to $750 billion over the next decade or so. “How are we going to go out and borrow $700 billion?” Mr. Obama asked Steve Croft on his Sixty Minutes interview on CBS last week.
It was a rhetorical question, for whose answer the President has appointed a bipartisan commission (right-wingers on both sides of the aisle) to “cure” the federal budget deficit. The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, known as the Deficit-Reduction Commission” among media friendlies, might better be called the New Class War Commission to Scale Back Social Security and Medicare Payments to Labor in Order to Leave more Tax Revenue Available to Give Away to the Super-Rich. A longer title, but sometimes it takes more words to get to the heart of matters.
The heart of the matter is “Big fish eat little fish.” There’s not enough tax money to continue swelling the fortunes of the super rich while making even a pretense of saving enough to pay the pensions and related social support that North American and European populations have been promised. Something must give. And the rich have shown themselves sufficiently foresighted to seize the initiative. For a preview of what’s in line for the United States, watch neoliberal Europe’s fight against the middle and working class in Greece, Ireland and Latvia.
What is needed to put Mr. Obama’s sell-out in perspective is the pro-Wall Street advisors he has chosen – not only Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke (who last week reaffirmed his loyalty to Milton Friedman’s Chicago School monetarism), but his Deficit Reduction Commission. Its majority is stacked with outspoken advocates of cutting back Social Security, Medicare and other social spending so as to “free” the budget for “non-discretionary” spending. Within a decade, interest on the public debt (that Reagan-Bush quadrupled and Bush-Obama redoubled) will amount to $1 trillion annually. As for military spending in the Near East, Asia and other regions responsible for much of the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit, the Commission is confident that Congress will always rise to the occasion and defer to whatever foreign threat is conjured up requiring new armed force.
The public is told of the nightmare of $1 trillion deficit to pay retirement income over the next half century – as if the Treasury and Fed have not just given Wall Street $13 trillion in bailouts without blinking an eye. President Obama’s $750 billion tax giveaway to the wealthiest 2% is mere icing on the cake that the rich will be eating when the bread lines get too long.
It’s all junk economics. Running a budget deficit is how modern governments inject credit and purchasing power to enable economies to grow. When they do not run deficits – e.g., when they run surpluses, as they did under Bill Clinton (1993-2000) – credit must be created by banks, at interest. And the problem with bank credit is that most is lent against collateral already in place. The effect is to inflate real estate and stock market prices. This creates capital gains – which the “original” 1913 U.S. income tax treated as normal income, but which today are taxed at only 15% (when they are collected at all, which is rarely in the case of commercial real estate).
The giveaway: the Commission’s position on tax deductibility for mortgage interest
The Deficit Reduction commission spills the beans with its proposal to remove the tax subsidy for high housing prices financed by mortgage debt. The proposal is only to move against homeowners – “the middle class” – not absentee owners, not commercial real estate investors, and not corporate raiders or other prime bank customers.
The IRS permits mortgage interest to be tax-deductible on the pretense that it is a necessary cost of doing business. In reality it is a subsidy for debt leveraging as opposed to equity investment (using one’s own money). This tax bias for debt rather than equity is largely responsible for loading down the U.S. economy with debt, encouraging corporate raiding with junk bonds, adding interest to the cost of doing business, and hence causing the debt deflation that is locking the economy into depression. This subsidy for debt leveraging also is the government’s largest giveaway to the banks. And it also happens to violate every precept of the classical economic drive for “free markets” in the 19th-century.
Table 7.11 of the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) reports that in 2009, total monetary interest paid in the U.S. economy amounted to $3,240 billion. Homeowners paid just under a sixth of this amount ($572 billion) on the homes they occupied. Mr. Obama’s commission estimates that removing the tax credit on this interest would yield the Treasury $131 billion in 2012.
Defenders of stopping this tax credit make the valid point that the mortgage-interest tax deduction does not really save homeowners money at all. It is a shortsighted illusion. And this argument is right – absolutely right. What the government gives to “the homeowner” on one hand is passed on to the mortgage banker by “the market” process that leads bidders for property to pledge the net available rental value to the banks in order to obtain a loan to buy the home (or an office building, or an entire industrial company, for that matter.) “Equilibrium” is achieved at the point where whatever rental value the tax collector relinquishes becomes available to be capitalized into bank loans.
This means that what appears at first as “helping homeowner” afford to pay mortgages turns out merely to enable them to afford to pay higher more interest to their bankers. The tax giveaway uses homebuyers as “throughputs” to transfer tax favoritism to the banks.
It gets worse. By removing the traditional tax on real estate, state, local and federal governments need to tax labor and industry more, by transforming the property tax onto income and sales taxes. For banks, this is transmuting tax revenue into gold – into interest. And as for the home-owning middle class, it now has to pay the former property tax to the banker as interest, and also to pay the new taxes on income and sales that are levied to make up for the tax shift.
I support removing the tax favoritism for debt leveraging. The problem with the Deficit Commission is that it does not extend this reform to the rest of the economy – to the commercial real estate sector, and to the corporate sector.
The argument is made that “The rich create jobs.” After all, somebody has to build the yachts. What is missing is the more general principle that wealth and income inequality destroy jobs. This is because beyond the wealthy soon reach a limit on how much they can consume. They spend their money buying financial securities – mainly bonds, which end up indebting the economy. And the debt overhead is what is pushing the economy into deepening depression today.
Since the 1980s, for example, corporate raiders have borrowed high-interest “junk bond” credit to take over companies. They make money by stripping assets, cutting back long-term investment, research and development, and paying out depreciation credits to their financiers. Once they take over financially parasitized companies, the new financial managers use corporate income to buy back their stock – thereby supporting its price, and hence the value of stock options that financial managers give themselves – and borrow yet more money for stock buybacks, and even simply to pay out as dividends. And when the process has run its course, they threaten their work force with bankruptcy that will wipe out its pension benefits if employees do not agree to “downsize” their claims and replace defined-benefit plans with defined-contribution plans (in which all that employees know is how much they pay in each month, not what they will get in the end.) By this time the financial managers have paid themselves outsized salaries and bonuses, and cashed in their stock options – all subsidized by the government’s favorable tax treatment of debt over equity investment.
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This self-destructive financial policy refined by “shareholder activists” has created consternation among old-fashioned investors – for instance, in the attempted raids on McDonalds and other companies in recent years. So why is the Deficit Reduction Commission restricting its removal of tax favoritism for debt leveraging only to the middle class (homeowners), not to the financial sector across the board?
Two thirds of homeowners do not even itemize their deductions, so the main effect of tax deductibility is on commercial investors. Most other countries do not permit such deductions – not Canada, or even Australia, where bank credit has been fueling a steep property bubble.
If the argument is correct (and I think it is) that permitting interest to be tax deductible merely “frees” more revenue to pay interest to banks – to be capitalized into yet higher loans – then why isn’t this true of the Donald Trumps and other absentee owners who seek always to use “other peoples’ money”? In practice, the “money” in question turns out to be bank credit whose cost to the banks is under 1% these days. The system is siphoning off rental value from commercial real estate investment by partnerships and corporations, increasing the price of rental properties, commercial real estate, and indeed, industry and agriculture.
Alas, the Obama administration has backed the Geithner-Bernanke policy that “the economy” cannot recover without saving the debt overhead. The reality is that it is the debt overhead that is destroying the economy. So we are dealing with the irreconcilable fact that the Obama position threatens to lower living standards from 10% to 20% over the coming few years – making the United States look more like Greece, Ireland and Latvia than what was promised in the last presidential election.
Something has to give politically if the economy is to change course. And what has to give is the underlying favoritism for Wall Street at the expense of the economy at large.
What has made the U.S. economy uncompetitive is primarily the degree to which debt service has been built into the cost of living and doing business. The NIPA report this debt service as a “service” payment for providing credit. But interest (like economic rent and monopoly price extraction) is more in the character of a transfer payment, a quid without quo. The beneficiaries are the super-rich at the top of the economic pyramid – the 2% that Mr. Obama’s tax giveaway will benefit by some $700 to $750 billion.
If the present direction of government is not reversed, Mr. Obama will shed crocodile tears for the middle class as it sponsors the Deficit Reduction Commission’s program for the middle class to suffer cutbacks in Social Security, and cutbacks in revenue sharing to enable states and cities to avoid defaulting on local pensions. The economy is now buckling under pressure of debt deflation. One third of U.S. real estate already is reported to have sunk into negative equity. This is squeezing state and local tax collection, forcing a choice to be made between bankruptcy, debt default, or shifting the losses onto the shoulders of labor, off those of the wealthy creditor layer of the economy responsible for loading it down with debt.
Critics of the Obama-Bush agenda are recalling how America’s Gilded Age of the late 19th century was an era of economic polarization and class war. At that time the Democratic leader William Jennings Bryan accused Wall Street and Eastern creditors of crucifying the American economy on a cross of gold. Restoration of gold at its pre-Civil War price entailed a financial war in the form of debt deflation. Falling prices and incomes received by farmers and wage labor made the burden of paying debts heavier. The Income Tax of 1913 sought to rectify this by only falling on the wealthiest 1% of the population – for they were the only ones obliged to file tax returns. Capital gains were taxed at normal rates. So most of the tax burden fell on finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector.
The vested interests have been fighting back for a century, and now see victory within reach with the perpetuation of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2%, phase-out of the estate tax on wealth, the tax shift off property onto labor income and consumer sales, and slashing government spending on anything besides more bailouts and subsidies for the emerging financial oligarchy.
Artwork courtesy of William Banzai7
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Believe me, it's not easy, but I can't imagine what my cousin making half what I do goes through. She's not paying for a software engineering degree, but it doesn't make her food and electricity any cheaper than mine. You know it wouldn't be so bad, though, if every millionaire/billionaire day-trader and job-outsourcer would shut the fuck up about how infintiely valuable they are to the economy and how all of us little people who actually work and produce stuff are such an unbearable burden to them.
I stopped "paying" US taxes in 2002. And it is with no diminished sense of joy that I say fuck the IRS.
my brain turns off whenever I hear someone talk about ditching the mortgage interest deduction. Quite simply, the additional revenue that would come as a result of getting rid of this deduction would not come close to being enough to justify the housing carnage that would occur. The problem is that the so called "middle class" simply does not have the necessary disposable income to cover any substantial tax increases. I ran some back of the napkin calculations, and for a person with 100k in salary paying 2400 in interest will pay 6600 a year in additional taxes. Wowza! That throws anyones cash flow calculations out the window. Vacations ... yeah right. At this point, my incentives will be to:
- Sell stocks/bonds/etc and put into mortgate as you now get a de-facto risk free return on your cash at whatever rate that mortgate is at. Halt the 401k contributions, etc....
- Sell the house if I can
- Default and live payment free for a year or so.
That third option would look mighty attractive. Who needs credit when you can pocket perhaps 20k in cash savings from simply not paying the mortgage! Which of these options benefits the economy?????
Here's the great irony. If I defaulted, poor old Fannie Mae would be hit with the capital loss of something like ... 50k??? Depends on what they could sell the house for after transaction costs and factoring that people can now afford less due to the tax increase... Since Fannie is back stopped by the Gubmint ... well ... do the math.
most of the wealth investment has been overseas not here in the US (cheap labor, cheap trinkets) ... tax cuts for that wealth has only worsened the situation but most mistakenly believe that these tax cuts have significantly improved business conditions for small businesses that have to conduct their businesses within the continental US. Just wait till another 10 to 15 % of the labor force has been reduced to turnips, how 'good' small businesses will be doing. The multiplier effect will devastate small businesses even further and their 'savings' of $10k or even $30k if that high from 'extending the tax cuts' won't amount to a hill of beans when the windows are being boarded up.
Income inequality has gotten way out of hand....Those arguing for flat tax are dreaming....when the top 2% make 25% of the country's total income, they need to be prepared to pay a lot of taxes cuz there's a lot of folks on food stamps.
Yeah, 1M+ crowd better fork over or they may find themselves on the dinner table.
Remember "Eat the Rich" ?
I'd prefer to eat the vegans first. They are grass-fed and all natural.
we make about a 100k, live below our means ,are thrifty and save 20%+ of our income
if you are making 400k and bitching you should get fucked
what are you wasting your money on that yer barely getting by?
we need tax cuts for 200k and under
the average man makes about 50k and is drowning
we pay 35%+ in taxes as it is...by the time we are done with property and other taxes, its closer to 50% of our income
with our 50k we are left with we do ok
sure i'd like some chinese made shit
but i dont need it, so i dont buy it
S510 passes and we cant have a garden to grow our own food, and we might have some problems
cant even imagine how someone making 50k can survive in middle class america
we need to go back to a 90% tax bracket for the uber rich
and how about 0% bracket for 25k and below?
Johnqpublic just another lower class retard.
Just 2 centuries ago our founding fathers came here to escape all of it...taxation, religious oppression and you have already fell for the "Ruling Elites 101"...arguing about which class should get less or more based off of income status simply because "yours" is lower?
They win because you already are playing into their shell game...
Get educated...if you can't then get your children educated so they can do better than you have for yourself and your family.
The mortgage deduction will be just a negotiating tool. The real aim is to permanently introduce a national VAT that can be stealthy increased on the productive economy to cover any future deficits. The Bush tax cuts are permanent-WS isn’t going to give up their capital gains tax and Washington can’t raise the income tax while leaving the cap/dividends cuts in place without a call out of class warfare.
Come back with this when BLS unemployment for the Bachelors class is 20%. It's now 4.7%. Until it's 20%, you are speaking to the void.
There is a hierarchy of BS degrees.
I remember with humor, many nights walking through the frat neighborhoods on my way back to the Engineering building to finish my homework, as the business majors were all getting drunk and courting barby chicks. They had a fun life. Then they graduated.
The Engineering job market (especially modern processes, efficiency upgrades, etc.) is pretty solid right now. But I don't think UPS is still hiring Business degreed delivery drivers like they once were....... waitress positions might be getting a little hard to come by for the Animal Science (MRS.) majors. :D
"Running a budget deficit is how modern governments inject credit and purchasing power to enable economies to grow."
Really??? I am absolutely stunned at the comment above. Why not go all in and really watch the economy grow? Why stop at $1.3trillion this year and $10trillion over the next 10 years?
I am a small business owner who has created over 20 new jobs in the last year. Not great but better than going in the other direction. I have increased liabibilities, taken on more risk and tried to make my business grow. It is pretty hard to want to keep doing this when you don't get to keep much to offset the risk being taken. Ilene's rant is a waste of space.
Senator Dubbin says there will be no extention of the bush tax policy. Per Briefing.dom market reaction -200 etc.
Be careful what you progressive populists pray for.
That's a convenient explanation.
This pig of a market has been/is being held up by HFT, front running POMO and U$D devaluation courtesy of QEII.
People have not caught on to Bennie's game of smoke and mirrors.
The cat's outta the bag that we're looking at a second banking crisis.
Insiders have been selling out since May Flash Crash.
What does that tell you?
The culture of entitlement is pervasive in all the socio-economic classes. Each individual can make a case that they deserve something at the expense of someone else. Social darwinism, "no jobs no peace" It's all the same.
Obama's fault is ultimately in his judgment. He could have co-opted the tax-cut meme from the GOP BEFORE the elections and things would have probably turned out differently in the H.O.R.
How the F is giving more $ to this corrupt system any help to the middle class? Bottom line, if the middle class wants more entitlements then they have to pay for them as well. The real criminals are the politicians that give special treatments to their friends in return for more power, not the entrepreneur trying to expand the economic pie. More $ to the Feds=more corruption at the highest level until there are only two classes of people, the poor and the well-connected. This article was such a waste of time.
Exactly right... by saying that confiscating wealth from the rich is a "good thing", you breed a Nancy Pelosi class of politician who will just turn around and use that confiscated wealth to bribe off the unwashed masses of idiots to keep voting for them in return for freebies.
On the other hand, if you say that all tax is bad, even taxing the rich, and the government needs to shrink, then the Nancy Pelosi class of politician dies off, and they will not have the funds to just blatantly bribe every hobo and illegal alien into voting for them.
Thre rich just bought the system
"the superrich who have gotten spectacularly richer over the last four decades while their fellow citizens either treaded water or lost ground. The top 1 percent of American earners took in 23.5 percent of the nation’s pretax income in 2007 — up from less than 9 percent in 1976. During the boom years of 2002 to 2007, that top 1 percent’s pretax income increased an extraordinary 10 percent every year. But the boom proved an exclusive affair: in that same period, the median income for non-elderly American households went down and the poverty rate rose."
So sure let's extend the tax break so Goldman Sachs and their minions and ilk can fully own it.
How many ZH posters are making more than 1M?
(crickets chirping)
Yeah, that's what I thought.
You know, I think that someone might listen to you if you eased up on the MSM political rhetoric.
Far left whining about unfairness in the world does not impress me.
If you want fair, set the tax rate to 15% for all Americans, and let everyone keep what they are capable of making. Such a notion is a liberal NIGHTMARE.
There was an ancient nation which had a 10% tax rate, no king, no ruling class, everyone took care of themselves and believed the same thing. Criminals quickly received what they inflicted. Crime didn't pay.
Then they all started going their own way, doing their own thing, and there was no more unity in belief. They were eventually conquered and carried away captive, and their identity was lost.
I'm not a fan of "multiculturalism". I've got nothing against racial diversity, but we should all believe and value the same things, and THEFT shouldn't be one of them. Too many groups pitted against each other in the modern world. It won't last........
I just read this--
Who Will Stand Up to the Super Rich?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/opinion/14rich.html
My favorite part:
>>>
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The G.O.P.’s arguments for extending the Bush tax cuts to this crowd, usually wrapped in laughably hypocritical whining about “class warfare,” are easily batted down. The most constant refrain is that small-business owners who file in this bracket would be hit so hard they could no longer hire new employees. But the Tax Policy Center found in 2008, when checking out similar campaign claims by “Joe the Plumber,” that only 2 percent of all Americans reporting small-business income, regardless of tax bracket, would see tax increases if Obama fulfilled his pledge to let the Bush tax cuts lapse for the top earners. The economist Dean Baker calculated that the yearly tax increase at the lower end of that bracket, for those with earnings between $200,000 and $500,000, would amount to $700 — which “isn’t enough to hire anyone.”<<<
And since they're not hiring anybody now anyway, I don't really give a damn if the super small businessman gets to keep his $700.
Any so-called "small businessman" $1M or more needs to fork over.
Enough with welfare for the wealthy. They benefitted disporportionately from the Bush Tax Cuts.
I can't cry enough crocodile tears for them now that they're facing an end to what they never should have gotten in the first place.
Ooops.
In the early 1990s I was making $250 to $300K and paid my taxes without bitching...This was the country that allowed me to make that money. ...It gulls me to hear folks making $400K today and complaining....If you don't like it, go to another country then!!!
No American should have to give 50% of what they earn to the government, no matter who they are or what they earn. That is just theft.
The government will waste and abuse the vast majority of that money; without a doubt, it is better left with the person who earned it.
totally agree
when the dollar collapses from the debt load, it'll be paid nonetheless.
My family makes a little over 400K combined annually yet we certainly do not feel rich...make the "new rich" limit 1 million and above and I am all in...otherwise we will begin to cut more and more just to stay afloat.
Do you really want people in America to have the bar set so low...I mean 250k doesn't even give you a "happy ending" by the time the IRS and other "fuck alls" take their pinch...really?
Well at least you get a "front row seat" for what's wrong with America... every time you look in the mirror (do you have any idea how many families live on < $20K a year)!
BTW... the tax on your first $250K would not change at all... so cry me a river "slob"!
SRV...exactly why do you think these people are making under 20k a year?
How many am I paying for now (99 weeks) so they don't want to take any job or aren't educated enough to do so...
So it is my responsibility to pay for that too?
I worked my ass off, payed for my degree and get judgment from the likes of you.
Fuck You...I WORKED my way out of it...I recommend you quit asking for handouts and work your way out if you care too...which I doubt you do.
C'mon Rob....You're obviously a middle aged white guy that worked hard....There's a bunch of minorities that can work just as hard and don't stand a chance of getting where you are....The system is rigged....There's only so much income per year that can be divided up by the population....The population that gets the most has the power to throw up roadblocks to prevent others from encroaching.....IE....I have an MBA from a good school but it's not from Harvard...Goldman only hires from the IVY league but the time value of money is taught the same everywhere...It's the glass ceiling I live with and I'm a middle aged educated white guy....Opportunity is not the same for everyone no matter how hard you try.
400k and your bitching?
go fuck yourself
Wow, what a whiny bitch you are.
Theopco talk about bitches...how many of your illegitimates am I paying for anyway...just kidding...
The point is we ALL pay to much in taxes...in your cable, cell phone, home phone, clothing, gas, food bill etc...
I used to be OK with paying my share until:
99 weekers
social security fraud
TARP
QE 1
QE 2
IMF
Medicare
Medicaid
And especially for Government Employee raises when everyone else gets to eat mush...you are part of the problem not the solution.
PS Asshole: I respect my plumber, electrician, nanny and yard man who I all pay in cash to save them from the misery I suffer every April 15th.
PSS: All who can and will be let go when the government takes too much...
{Rant off}
Seriously dude.
Lots of people would consider you rich. Including your servants, no doubt.
Yet you are willing to throw people making more than you under the bus. That's some mighty nice hypocrisy there bub.
As for how many of my illegitimates you're paying for- impossible to say really...
"awww, c'mon Scro'....don't be a pussy. Beats jail, don't it?" POTUS
You're so dumb it's scary.
I agree. It seems like we have quite a contrast in writings her at ZH. I'm all for diversity of thought, but the old "George Bush was the devil" boilerplate served up with a side of "Marxist redistribution of wealth", and a "socialist revolution is in the air" for desert is a meal served spoiled. I say "no thanks".
You only need to look at the atrocities of every Communist regime in history, 100s of million dead, and it's sole survivor, China, has resorted to Capitalism for survival, and still teeters on the brink of social unrest at all times with 600M-800M living in rife poverty. The poisoned brand of Capitalism we have lived under for the last 100 years has failed us, but it is a tribute to it's inner strength that it survived this long. Unfortunately, most of us fail to recognize that ANY system that fully un-pegs from basic morals of truth, integrity, and honesty as we have, will fail in spectacular fashion. The difference is that unbridled Communism/Socialism unsually end in death camps.
If the Bush tax cuts are extended for two more years, how will that play out for the estate tax. Under Bush, estate tax had a gradual raising on the exemption limit from $1,000,000 in 2002 up to $3,500,000 in 2009. In 2010, the estate tax exemption is unlimited, essentially repealing the estate tax for that year. It was scheduled to go back to $1,000,000 in 2011 or be renegotiated in Congress to a new exemption limit.
I wonder if the next two years will have an unlimited exemption?