Most of us liberal types who hoped for single-payer universal health service and for continuing progressive income tax for the top 2 percent have accepted the compromised result. I acknowledge that politics implies compromise. I regret that these are issues of social justice and the result is opportunity lost.
What gets my attention now is that the Republican speakers and the pundits in their camp are striving for the elimination of the estate tax. (They vilify it by calling it the "death tax".) It would tax estates over $7 million. They say it would harm farmers and small business. In fact, it would impact only a few hundred American farmers, few of whom live on the property and put on their overalls and muck boots before dawn.
No one seems to point out that the "very rich" don't really earn anything from their education, skill, practice, and certainly not from their sweat. It is the money that they control that makes the obscene levels of more money that ought to be progressively taxed. And they would like to keep it all in the family to continue the course.
In most cases, the money has been inherited from people who did work, have imagination, skills or cunning, and did take chances. Maybe they were motivated by greed and did exploit resources
and even people. But it troubles me that the current generation operates with such a sense of entitlement. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Neither deserve it.
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Donald Layton
Rochester
