The least educated, poorest women is who we will force to carry to term...

[lustylad]

Originally Posted by WTF

Wtf is wrong with you? Don't you know how to solve problems? Or are you part of the ignorant AF crowd that does nothing to fix problems.

Are you talking to Joe Biden again?

Wow... you really have a bad case of buyer's remorse, dontcha?

[WTF]

Originally Posted by texassapper

What was it then? I distinctly recall hearing my daughters heart beat via sonogram at 8 weeks. What was I hearing if not the heart? Why did the Doctor say, "That's her heartbeat." ?

I don't care about your opinions on viability. That's not the question under consideration... Unless you link the babies humanity to its ability to live. Do you?

Originally Posted by Levianon17

Yes it was your daughter's heart you heard beating. Her brain and Nervous System was also beginning to develop.


https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/art...ve-a-heartbeat

you two were hearing hearts were ya now?

https://www.thecut.com/2019/05/embry...ve-hearts.html


To wit: though pulsing cells can be detected in embryos as early as six weeks, this rhythm — detected by a doctor, via ultrasound — cannot be called a “heartbeat,” because embryos don’t have hearts. What is detectable at or around six weeks can more accurately be called “cardiac activity,” says Robyn Schickler, OB/GYN and fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health. The difference between “cardiac activity” and “heartbeat” may seem linguistically minimal, but Schickler and others argue otherwise. At this stage, she says, what doctors can detect is essentially communication between a group of what will eventually become cardiac cells.

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“From very early on, different cells are programmed to do different things for what is eventually a fully functioning human body,” says Jennifer Kerns, an OB/GYN and professor at the University of California in San Francisco. “These are cells that are programmed with electrical activity, which will eventually control the heart rate — they send a signal telling the heart to contract, once there is a heart.” It is this early activity which ultrasounds detect — not a heartbeat.

In a doctor/patient setting, though, says Shickler, physicians have used the term “heartbeat” or “fetal heartbeat” to convey to patients with wanted pregnancies that fetal development is proceeding as it should. “If I have a patient in front of me who is excited about her pregnancy, and hoping for signs that it’s currently developing properly, that little flicker can tell us that, at that point in the pregnancy, things look good,” says Sarah Horvath, a family planning fellow at The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. That things “look good” is not equivalent to declaring a fetus viable, and patients can and do experience miscarriage, stillbirth, or other developmental problems after seeing that flicker on an ultrasound. To someone who wants to be pregnant, it’s merely a good sign.


Part of the effort behind popularizing “heartbeat bill” as a term is the conservative effort to propose a new, much earlier standard of viability, the term used to describe the point at which a fetus has a good chance of survival outside the womb with access to maximum medical intervention, says Kerns. It simply isn’t true that a six-week embryo is viable. While there is no unanimous timeline assigned to viability, most doctors use 24 weeks as a general rule.

But what arose as a colloquialism between doctors and patients has, in the case of the fight over abortion rights, done more harm than good, says Schickler. At six weeks, she says, a pregnant person has likely just missed their period two weeks earlier, and at that stage, the fetus is far from viable — so calling any activity detected by ultrasound at that stage a heartbeat “personifies the fetus into something it’s not,” says Schickler. Which, says Kerns, is exactly the point.

“It’s a deliberate use of a word that evokes a very emotional response, and conjures up the idea of an actual heart as we know it,” says Kerns. At six weeks, she says the embryo is about seven millimeters long, such that the flicker made visible by ultrasound technology is about the size of a pencil tip, she adds. “Heartbeat” conjures an organ which expands and contracts, but a six-week embryo has yet to develop that structure, says Horvath.

“The characteristic ‘lub-dub’ of the heart is created by the valves in a four-chambered heart opening and closing,” says Horvath. Even when that structure does develop, it’s not like it works on its own. “In order for a fully formed heart to function properly, it has to communicate with other systems of the body,” says Kerns. “It has to communicate with the neurologic system, so the brain has to be developed enough to send signals to the heart to speed up, slow down, to function.” For that reason (among others), it’s inaccurate and unscientific to define viability by the mere existence of any one organ.


By calling anti-abortion legislation “heartbeat bills,” or insisting that an embryo has a heart that beats at 18 days, anti-abortion activists are vastly, and dangerously, over-simplifying fetal development for political gain. And according to some polls

[WTF]

Originally Posted by Tiny

The Progressives are as big of contributors as any to our tax system built on Tomfoolery. They favor high headline rates and lots of loopholes for their favored special interests.

The current lifetime gift and estate tax exemption is $12 million per individual, not $24 million. The exemption was only $675,000 in the year 2000. It stayed the same or rose, to $5,490,000 in 2017, before doubling in 2018. Biden wants to knock it back down to $3.5 million. Anything in excess of the exemption is currently taxed at a federal rate of 40%. Some states have additional gift and estate taxes.

Each time a moderately successful business, capitalized in part by debt, was passed to future generations, the estate tax had to be paid.

Again, I never wrote anything about farms or ranches. I did write that many American family-owned businesses have been damaged because of the estate tax. It's the reason we don't have a well-developed, multi-generational Mittelstand like Germany. The Mittelstand, privately run family businesses, account for 52% of Germany's economic output and employ 15 million Germans:

https://eccie.net/newreply.php?do=newreply&p=1062844287

Are you more conservative than I am? You're anti-Libertarian and don't believe in classical liberalism, vis-a-vis economic issues. You do however have good instincts on social issues.

I no longer believe you're a three-quarters Libertarian. You're a 50% Libertarian.

There's another name for 50% Libertarians. Democrats.

12 million per individual, 24 million per couple! Read the arguments below. And also since you brought up Germany, how about you looking up their Gini Coefficient.


The Very Bad Arguments for Killing the Estate Tax
It’s minuscule, cumbersome, and easily avoided. It's also a symbol of Washington’s approach to dynastic wealth and the American Dream.

By Derek Thompson

Richard T. Nowitz / Getty
NOVEMBER 13, 2017
SHARE
The estate tax, which the House GOP bill would repeal and the Senate GOP bill would cut, is a microcosm of a long economic debate in the United States.

One must emphasize here the prefix micro in microcosm. Revenues from the estate tax, which only applies to inheritances worth more than $5.5 million, will account for about $20 billion this year in federal revenues. That’s approximately one-half of 1 percent of the Treasury’s annual haul. Compared to total federal spending, it’s nothing.


But compared to nothing, it’s $20 billion. And the tax code is more than a ledger. It is a national statement of values. And so this little law inspires a great commotion during each tax debate. To its opponents, it is the ultimate (literally) punishment on success and an affront to the family legacy that each striving individual hopes to leave. To its supporters, it is a necessary bulwark against inherited plutocracy, which offends the national virtue of merit over privilege.

To understand the estate tax’s current fragility, start with its history. The practice of taxing upon death is almost as old as recorded history itself. Nearly 2,000 years ago, the Roman Emperor Augustus imposed the Vicesina Hereditatium, a tax on the wealthiest Roman estates upon the death of their patriarch. What’s often considered the first such tax in the U.S. was levied in 1797, when the U.S. required federally taxed stamps for all probates and wills. For the next century it was used off and on as a source of emergency revenue during wars and other times of crisis.


The modern estate tax was born in 1916, alongside the federal income tax. Except during the 1930s, when several tweaks to the law increased its share of federal revenue, its contribution to the Treasury has been extremely consistent, always hovering around 1 percent of federal taxes.

Estate and Gift Taxes as Share of Total U.S. Revenue

IRS
The law has faced occasional resistance but few serious attempts at repeal. But starting in the 1990s, conservatives mobilized to end the tax for good. A widely cited 1994 study from the right-leaning Tax Foundation reported that it discouraged entrepreneurship. Meanwhile, Republicans worked aggressively to end the estate tax, finding purchase in two arguments against it.



First, they rallied around the moniker “death tax.” This succeeded in persuading many Americans that the law threatened upper-middle-class families. In a 2001 Gallup survey, 17 percent of Americans said they feared they owed estate taxes, at least eight times higher than the actual figure. From a marketing perspective, this was quite brilliant.

From a descriptive standpoint, it was quite misleading. To the extent that the estate tax is a “death tax,” it is the least effective tax ever devised—not because it fails to discourage death, but because it fails, even more basically, to tax it. In 2013, 2.6 million people died. Fewer than 5,000 of them had taxable estates. That means, each year, the so-called death tax fails miserably in its job, missing more than 99.8 percent of the year’s deaths.

Second, Republicans have for two decades found it useful to claim that the law hurts independent farmers, presumably because this makes it seem like the tax is striking at the nation’s traditional agrarian heart. This past week, Gary Cohn, the White House chief economic adviser, made an impassioned plea that the estate tax holds a special cruelty for America’s farms. “You have a family farm that’s big enough that it’s going to hit the estate tax, you start paying lawyers, consultants, and accountants to break up your land, and break up your farm,” he said.

The idea that the estate tax is destroying the lives of thousands of ordinary family farmers is an urban legend (or, technically speaking, a rural legend). When I called up Len Burman, an economist at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center (TPC), to ask if Cohn were making any sense, Burman assured me that he was not. “If Cohn were trying to make a parody of the rich people’s argument for the estate tax, he couldn’t have done a better job,” Burman said. In the early 2000s, the American Farm Bureau Federation failed to name a single example of a farm lost to the estate tax. This year there are fewer than 100 farms in the U.S. that will owe any estate tax in the U.S., according to TPC estimates. Their average tax rate will be approximately 6 percent.

There are, however, some reasonable conservative arguments against the estate tax. The first is it’s a tax on thrift. Imagine two people who each earn $20 million in their lifetime. One spends everything on Ferraris, pieds-à-terre in nine different countries, and a garish taxidermy collection. The other lives a relatively humble suburban life, drives a Prius, and saves millions of dollars for his kids and grandkids. The Prius driver would end up owing more in estate taxes, and it seems cruel to punish any family, rich or poor, for this sort of planning.

What’s more, it’s reasonable to complain that the estate tax functions as a double tax. A person might pay payroll and income taxes on earnings and then pay inheritance tax on the savings left behind. The important caveat to this, however, is that about half of the largest inheritances are capital gains held until death that have not been taxed. Also, the heirs of the estate are paying tax on the bequest once.

Finally, it’s pretty common for most families close to the threshold to escape the tax, by gifting money to children, grandchildren, and spouses, deducting large charitable contributions, and protecting some of the assets in trusts. In fact, there are so many ways to avoid the estate tax—and there is so much energy expended by rich families to avoid it—that the best argument against the tax might be that it stimulates a lot of unproductive work hiding posthumous assets from the federal government.

But the arguments for the tax are far stronger. First, while it stimulates lawyer and accountant fees, it seems to stimulate charitable giving even more. A 2004 report by the Congressional Budget Office found that eliminating the estate tax would reduce charitable giving by up to 12 percent, which would be the equivalent of about $4 billion in 2018.

Second, anybody who believes in equality of opportunity or the dignity of work should worry about the impact of America’s plutocratic class relying on the untaxed inheritance of their parents. Over 100 years ago, Andrew Carnegie famously asserted that the worst thing a rich man can do to his children is to bequeath a large inheritance, because it transforms them into slothful layabouts. The claim, now known as the Carnegie Conjecture, might seem backward. After all, large inheritances tend to come from rich, well-connected parents whose children have better access to excellent schools and professional networks. But a 1992 paper whose lead author was the economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin found that people with an inheritance of over $150,000—or, in 2017, about $270,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars—are four times more likely to leave the labor force than someone with an inheritance of just one-sixth that size. A large inheritance doesn’t turn every heir into a high-class loafer. But it does seem to encourage more high-class loafing.

Third, in a period defined by the rising gap between rich and poor, one cannot ignore the enormous role played by inheritance in sustained economic inequality. According to analysis by Matt Bruenig, a writer and the founder of the advocacy group People’s Policy Project, four out of 10 members of the wealthiest 1 percent inherited some money, with an average inheritance in the millions of dollars.

There is nothing wrong with earned success and wealth, but each developed country is responsible for finding the right balance between rewarding achievement and protecting the lower income. In the last half century, the average wealth of the bottom half has gone from about nothing to about $1,000 in debt. Meanwhile, the returns at the top have accelerated. In the 1960s, families in the top 1 percent were six times wealthier than families in the middle, according to the Urban Institute. By 2016, the 1 percent was 12 times wealthier than the typical family. As wealth inequality has soared, the estate tax has been diminished, with the number of estate tax returns declining by 76 percent between 2006 and 2015. There is little doubt that 21st-century tax policy has assisted the concentration of wealth.

A stronger estate tax combined with tax benefits to lower-income households with children would instead democratize opportunity. Conservative politicians like Paul Ryan have spoken eloquently about the need for any strong economy to provide young Americans with equal opportunities. It is simply impossible to imagine how killing the estate tax, the single most progressive element of the U.S. tax code, brings the nation any closer to meritocracy.

[Levianon17]

Originally Posted by WTF

you two were hearing hearts were ya now?

https://www.thecut.com/2019/05/embry...ve-hearts.html


To wit: though pulsing cells can be detected in embryos as early as six weeks, this rhythm — detected by a doctor, via ultrasound — cannot be called a “heartbeat,” because embryos don’t have hearts. What is detectable at or around six weeks can more accurately be called “cardiac activity,” says Robyn Schickler, OB/GYN and fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health. The difference between “cardiac activity” and “heartbeat” may seem linguistically minimal, but Schickler and others argue otherwise. At this stage, she says, what doctors can detect is essentially communication between a group of what will eventually become cardiac cells.

Sign up for Brooding
A biweekly newsletter delivering deep thoughts on modern family life.

Enter your email
“From very early on, different cells are programmed to do different things for what is eventually a fully functioning human body,” says Jennifer Kerns, an OB/GYN and professor at the University of California in San Francisco. “These are cells that are programmed with electrical activity, which will eventually control the heart rate — they send a signal telling the heart to contract, once there is a heart.” It is this early activity which ultrasounds detect — not a heartbeat.

In a doctor/patient setting, though, says Shickler, physicians have used the term “heartbeat” or “fetal heartbeat” to convey to patients with wanted pregnancies that fetal development is proceeding as it should. “If I have a patient in front of me who is excited about her pregnancy, and hoping for signs that it’s currently developing properly, that little flicker can tell us that, at that point in the pregnancy, things look good,” says Sarah Horvath, a family planning fellow at The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. That things “look good” is not equivalent to declaring a fetus viable, and patients can and do experience miscarriage, stillbirth, or other developmental problems after seeing that flicker on an ultrasound. To someone who wants to be pregnant, it’s merely a good sign.


Part of the effort behind popularizing “heartbeat bill” as a term is the conservative effort to propose a new, much earlier standard of viability, the term used to describe the point at which a fetus has a good chance of survival outside the womb with access to maximum medical intervention, says Kerns. It simply isn’t true that a six-week embryo is viable. While there is no unanimous timeline assigned to viability, most doctors use 24 weeks as a general rule.

But what arose as a colloquialism between doctors and patients has, in the case of the fight over abortion rights, done more harm than good, says Schickler. At six weeks, she says, a pregnant person has likely just missed their period two weeks earlier, and at that stage, the fetus is far from viable — so calling any activity detected by ultrasound at that stage a heartbeat “personifies the fetus into something it’s not,” says Schickler. Which, says Kerns, is exactly the point.

“It’s a deliberate use of a word that evokes a very emotional response, and conjures up the idea of an actual heart as we know it,” says Kerns. At six weeks, she says the embryo is about seven millimeters long, such that the flicker made visible by ultrasound technology is about the size of a pencil tip, she adds. “Heartbeat” conjures an organ which expands and contracts, but a six-week embryo has yet to develop that structure, says Horvath.

“The characteristic ‘lub-dub’ of the heart is created by the valves in a four-chambered heart opening and closing,” says Horvath. Even when that structure does develop, it’s not like it works on its own. “In order for a fully formed heart to function properly, it has to communicate with other systems of the body,” says Kerns. “It has to communicate with the neurologic system, so the brain has to be developed enough to send signals to the heart to speed up, slow down, to function.” For that reason (among others), it’s inaccurate and unscientific to define viability by the mere existence of any one organ.


By calling anti-abortion legislation “heartbeat bills,” or insisting that an embryo has a heart that beats at 18 days, anti-abortion activists are vastly, and dangerously, over-simplifying fetal development for political gain. And according to some polls

The human heart isn't completely developed with all four chambers at six weeks but there is still cellular respiration as the heart develops. So don't think for a minute that a human embryo at six weeks isn't alive and cellular activity isn't going on as it enters every stage of it's development. It takes roughly nine months or 40 weeks for a pregnancy to be completed and a child to be born and become independent from it's mother's womb. It's simply not OK to terminate it before hand just because a women has been told it's her right. If it was her right the Abortion issue would never exist.

[WTF]

Originally Posted by Levianon17

. So don't think for a minute that a human embryo at six weeks isn't alive and cellular activity isn't going on as it

You're half correct...there is cellular activity going on buy it is not alive.

[WTF]

Originally Posted by lustylad

Are you talking to Joe Biden again?

Wow... you really have a bad case of buyer's remorse, dontcha?

If you do not slow down on the dumb ass posting, you're gonna be the poster child for pro choice!

[Levianon17]

Originally Posted by WTF

You're half correct...there is cellular activity going on buy it is not alive.

Cellular activity doesn't take place in non living organisms. Many Cells give rise to tissues. Tissues give rise to organs and organs give rise to systems. A developing fetus is constantly changing to achieve that ultimate goal.

[dilbert firestorm]

Originally Posted by Levianon17

The human heart isn't completely developed with all four chambers at six weeks but there is still cellular respiration as the heart develops. So don't think for a minute that a human embryo at six weeks isn't alive and cellular activity isn't going on as it enters every stage of it's development. It takes roughly nine months or 40 weeks for a pregnancy to be completed and a child to be born and become independent from it's mother's womb. It's simply not OK to terminate it before hand just because a women has been told it's her right. If it was her right the Abortion issue would never exist.

fetal heart beat at 6 weeks, from what I understand, isn't a true heartbeat. it mimics like one. it pulses like that of a humming bird's wings.

the baby's heart is beating on its own at 17 weeks (4 months).

[WTF]

Originally Posted by Levianon17

Cellular activity doesn't take place in non living organisms. Many Cells give rise to tissues. Tissues give rise to organs and organs give rise to systems. A developing fetus is constantly changing to achieve that ultimate goal.

You're making my case.

Look, if you don't want an abortion don't get one but do not try and impose your morals on others.

[Levianon17]

Originally Posted by WTF

You're making my case.

Look, if you don't want an abortion don't get one but do not try and impose your morals on others.

You don't have a valid case. You're desperately trying to exert your morals and beliefs others.

[Levianon17]

Originally Posted by dilbert firestorm

fetal heart beat at 6 weeks, from what I understand, isn't a true heartbeat. it mimics like one. it pulses like that of a humming bird's wings.

the baby's heart is beating on its own at 17 weeks (4 months).

In a conventional sense you're right because not all four heart chambers are completely developed at six weeks. But as the Heart begins to develop there is some activity associated with it.

[lustylad]

Originally Posted by WTF

Look, if you don't want an abortion don't get one but do not try and impose your morals on others.

Yes - all "birthing persons" should have that right!

So... how many have you had?

[bambino]

Originally Posted by lustylad

Yes - all "birthing persons" should have that right!

So... how many have you had?

He shits himself everyday. Just like his buddy Joey Bribes.

[Tiny]

Originally Posted by WTF

12 million per individual, 24 million per couple! Read the arguments below. And also since you brought up Germany, how about you looking up their Gini Coefficient.


The Very Bad Arguments for Killing the Estate Tax
It’s minuscule, cumbersome, and easily avoided. It's also a symbol of Washington’s approach to dynastic wealth and the American Dream.

By Derek Thompson

Richard T. Nowitz / Getty
NOVEMBER 13, 2017
SHARE
The estate tax, which the House GOP bill would repeal and the Senate GOP bill would cut, is a microcosm of a long economic debate in the United States.

One must emphasize here the prefix micro in microcosm. Revenues from the estate tax, which only applies to inheritances worth more than $5.5 million, will account for about $20 billion this year in federal revenues. That’s approximately one-half of 1 percent of the Treasury’s annual haul. Compared to total federal spending, it’s nothing.


But compared to nothing, it’s $20 billion. And the tax code is more than a ledger. It is a national statement of values. And so this little law inspires a great commotion during each tax debate. To its opponents, it is the ultimate (literally) punishment on success and an affront to the family legacy that each striving individual hopes to leave. To its supporters, it is a necessary bulwark against inherited plutocracy, which offends the national virtue of merit over privilege.

To understand the estate tax’s current fragility, start with its history. The practice of taxing upon death is almost as old as recorded history itself. Nearly 2,000 years ago, the Roman Emperor Augustus imposed the Vicesina Hereditatium, a tax on the wealthiest Roman estates upon the death of their patriarch. What’s often considered the first such tax in the U.S. was levied in 1797, when the U.S. required federally taxed stamps for all probates and wills. For the next century it was used off and on as a source of emergency revenue during wars and other times of crisis.


The modern estate tax was born in 1916, alongside the federal income tax. Except during the 1930s, when several tweaks to the law increased its share of federal revenue, its contribution to the Treasury has been extremely consistent, always hovering around 1 percent of federal taxes.

Estate and Gift Taxes as Share of Total U.S. Revenue

IRS
The law has faced occasional resistance but few serious attempts at repeal. But starting in the 1990s, conservatives mobilized to end the tax for good. A widely cited 1994 study from the right-leaning Tax Foundation reported that it discouraged entrepreneurship. Meanwhile, Republicans worked aggressively to end the estate tax, finding purchase in two arguments against it.



First, they rallied around the moniker “death tax.” This succeeded in persuading many Americans that the law threatened upper-middle-class families. In a 2001 Gallup survey, 17 percent of Americans said they feared they owed estate taxes, at least eight times higher than the actual figure. From a marketing perspective, this was quite brilliant.

From a descriptive standpoint, it was quite misleading. To the extent that the estate tax is a “death tax,” it is the least effective tax ever devised—not because it fails to discourage death, but because it fails, even more basically, to tax it. In 2013, 2.6 million people died. Fewer than 5,000 of them had taxable estates. That means, each year, the so-called death tax fails miserably in its job, missing more than 99.8 percent of the year’s deaths.

Second, Republicans have for two decades found it useful to claim that the law hurts independent farmers, presumably because this makes it seem like the tax is striking at the nation’s traditional agrarian heart. This past week, Gary Cohn, the White House chief economic adviser, made an impassioned plea that the estate tax holds a special cruelty for America’s farms. “You have a family farm that’s big enough that it’s going to hit the estate tax, you start paying lawyers, consultants, and accountants to break up your land, and break up your farm,” he said.

The idea that the estate tax is destroying the lives of thousands of ordinary family farmers is an urban legend (or, technically speaking, a rural legend). When I called up Len Burman, an economist at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center (TPC), to ask if Cohn were making any sense, Burman assured me that he was not. “If Cohn were trying to make a parody of the rich people’s argument for the estate tax, he couldn’t have done a better job,” Burman said. In the early 2000s, the American Farm Bureau Federation failed to name a single example of a farm lost to the estate tax. This year there are fewer than 100 farms in the U.S. that will owe any estate tax in the U.S., according to TPC estimates. Their average tax rate will be approximately 6 percent.

There are, however, some reasonable conservative arguments against the estate tax. The first is it’s a tax on thrift. Imagine two people who each earn $20 million in their lifetime. One spends everything on Ferraris, pieds-à-terre in nine different countries, and a garish taxidermy collection. The other lives a relatively humble suburban life, drives a Prius, and saves millions of dollars for his kids and grandkids. The Prius driver would end up owing more in estate taxes, and it seems cruel to punish any family, rich or poor, for this sort of planning.

What’s more, it’s reasonable to complain that the estate tax functions as a double tax. A person might pay payroll and income taxes on earnings and then pay inheritance tax on the savings left behind. The important caveat to this, however, is that about half of the largest inheritances are capital gains held until death that have not been taxed. Also, the heirs of the estate are paying tax on the bequest once.

Finally, it’s pretty common for most families close to the threshold to escape the tax, by gifting money to children, grandchildren, and spouses, deducting large charitable contributions, and protecting some of the assets in trusts. In fact, there are so many ways to avoid the estate tax—and there is so much energy expended by rich families to avoid it—that the best argument against the tax might be that it stimulates a lot of unproductive work hiding posthumous assets from the federal government.

But the arguments for the tax are far stronger. First, while it stimulates lawyer and accountant fees, it seems to stimulate charitable giving even more. A 2004 report by the Congressional Budget Office found that eliminating the estate tax would reduce charitable giving by up to 12 percent, which would be the equivalent of about $4 billion in 2018.

Second, anybody who believes in equality of opportunity or the dignity of work should worry about the impact of America’s plutocratic class relying on the untaxed inheritance of their parents. Over 100 years ago, Andrew Carnegie famously asserted that the worst thing a rich man can do to his children is to bequeath a large inheritance, because it transforms them into slothful layabouts. The claim, now known as the Carnegie Conjecture, might seem backward. After all, large inheritances tend to come from rich, well-connected parents whose children have better access to excellent schools and professional networks. But a 1992 paper whose lead author was the economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin found that people with an inheritance of over $150,000—or, in 2017, about $270,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars—are four times more likely to leave the labor force than someone with an inheritance of just one-sixth that size. A large inheritance doesn’t turn every heir into a high-class loafer. But it does seem to encourage more high-class loafing.

Third, in a period defined by the rising gap between rich and poor, one cannot ignore the enormous role played by inheritance in sustained economic inequality. According to analysis by Matt Bruenig, a writer and the founder of the advocacy group People’s Policy Project, four out of 10 members of the wealthiest 1 percent inherited some money, with an average inheritance in the millions of dollars.

There is nothing wrong with earned success and wealth, but each developed country is responsible for finding the right balance between rewarding achievement and protecting the lower income. In the last half century, the average wealth of the bottom half has gone from about nothing to about $1,000 in debt. Meanwhile, the returns at the top have accelerated. In the 1960s, families in the top 1 percent were six times wealthier than families in the middle, according to the Urban Institute. By 2016, the 1 percent was 12 times wealthier than the typical family. As wealth inequality has soared, the estate tax has been diminished, with the number of estate tax returns declining by 76 percent between 2006 and 2015. There is little doubt that 21st-century tax policy has assisted the concentration of wealth.

A stronger estate tax combined with tax benefits to lower-income households with children would instead democratize opportunity. Conservative politicians like Paul Ryan have spoken eloquently about the need for any strong economy to provide young Americans with equal opportunities. It is simply impossible to imagine how killing the estate tax, the single most progressive element of the U.S. tax code, brings the nation any closer to meritocracy.

This fucker Dereck Thompson basically gets a boner just thinking about fucking rich people. And fucking people who save money. Yeah, you could just issue T-bills at 0.5% interest when inflation is 8.5%, and get their money. BUT THAT'S TOO FUCKING SLOW. Just take 40%, from the dead people. BECAUSE DEAD PEOPLE DON'T VOTE! No matter that the tax raises around 20 billion a year, a pittance in comparison to 3.8 trillion a year in total federal revenue. No matter it creates economic inefficiencies when people jump through hoops to avoid the tax. No matter the compliance costs are huge. FUCK THE RICH PEOPLE. Wipe out 40% of their capital. Knee cap family owned businesses. That's the ticket to true prosperity -- make everyone poorer in a way that makes everyone more equal. You could instead look at ways to raise up the poor. But fuck that. You want to be Al Capone - err, sorry - you want to be Robin Hood? Or you want to be Mother Teresa? You wanna be Fucking Al Capone, the United States fucking government. Err, sorry, I meant you wanna be Robin Hood. Mother Teresa is BORING.

This fucker Dereck Thompson is egging on politicians to steal peoples' money. Well fuck him.

[WTF]

Lol...settle down Tiny.