Yesterday, I was in a Telluride art gallery for the opening of a show featuring the work of a friend. Since we were driving back that night, I had to lay off the Colorado-made vodka being poured. And since I was in Colorado, I missed Drinking Liberally with the candidate I'd most want to have a beer with — Tom Rukavina.
(Who would I put on the opposite end of the scale, among the DFL candidates? John Marty and Mark Dayton, just because I doubt having beer around would loosen up the conversation in either case. Come to think of it, hard to imagine Rukavina getting any looser than he already is.)
Since this is about crossing the divide on occasion, I'd have to pick Marty Seifert as my top GOP beerpanion, unless Norm Coleman were available, in which case, I'd pick him and... no, I'm going to stay high road on this one.
Anyway, when I returned, I read Spot's piece on the estate tax repeal for 2010, and its implications for the estates of people unlucky enough to die in 2010. In the words of the New York Times editorial he quotes:
The bottom line is this: there will be many more losers than winners under estate-tax repeal, and the losers will be among Americans who are farther down the wealth ladder.
As Spot notes, the estate tax is not a "death" tax. ("Death tax" is not just a propaganda line used by anti-tax zealots. The term has crept into official Treasury Department and other government documents during the Bush Administration.) Death is an event we all get to attend, and most of us will never have to pay such a tax, as heirs or posthumously.
Instead, the estate tax is tax on the transfer of value from one party to another — as with most taxes, in the form of wages, interest, sales of property or goods, and realized capital gains. (Property taxes, motor vehicle taxes and pollution taxes are among the exceptions.)
The preferred argument against the estate tax is that it would hurt heirs of small businesses and family farms, which with the exemptions in place before the 2010 repeal, was nonsense. This happened very rarely, in cases where the estate holders failed to take advantage of planning safeguards in the tax law.
Which brings me back to Telluride, a former remote mining town transformed by a ski hill and lot of money arriving in seven- and eight-digit bundles. Most of those family ranches, from Ridgway (cowboy fantasy of Ralph Lauren) to Telluride, have already passed into the hands of wealthy trophy homeowners, speculators, developers and the over-extended.
Yesterday, we watched a woman buy about six pieces of art gallery jewelry (no price tags visible) just for giggles. Somehow, she was able to make it through the day, despite the estate tax.
