The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [91]
Nowhere has this confusion been more evident than in the debate surrounding the proposed repeal of the estate tax. As currently structured, a husband and wife can pass on $4 million without paying any estate tax; in 2009, under current law, that figure goes up to $7 million. For this reason, the tax currently affects only the wealthiest one-half of 1 percent of the population, and will affect only one-third of 1 percent in 2009. And since completely repealing the estate tax would cost the U.S. Treasury around $1 trillion, it would be hard to find a tax cut that was less responsive to the needs of ordinary Americans or the long-term interests of the country.
Nevertheless, after some shrewd marketing by the President and his allies, 70 percent of the country now opposes the “death tax.” Farm groups come to visit my office, insisting that the estate tax will mean the end of the family farm, despite the Farm Bureau’s inability to point to a single farm in the country lost as a result of the “death tax.” Meanwhile, I’ve had corporate CEOs explain to me that it’s easy for Warren Buffett to favor an estate tax—even if his estate is taxed at 90 percent, he could still have a few billion to pass on to his kids—but that the tax is grossly unfair to those with estates worth “only” $10 or $15 million.
So let’s be clear. The rich in America have little to complain about. Between 1971 and 2001, while the median wage and salary income of the average worker showed literally no gain, the income of the top hundredth of a percent went up almost 500 percent. The distribution of wealth is even more skewed, and levels of inequality are now higher than at any time since the Gilded Age. These trends were already at work throughout the nineties. Clinton’s tax policies simply slowed them down a bit. Bush’s tax cuts made them worse.
I point out these facts not—as Republican talking points would have it—to stir up class envy. I admire many Americans of great wealth and don’t begrudge their success in the least. I know that many if not most have earned it through hard work, building businesses and creating jobs and providing value to their customers. I simply believe that those of us who have benefited most from this new economy can best afford to shoulder the obligation of ensuring every American child has a chance for that same success. And perhaps I possess a certain Midwestern sensibility that I inherited from my mother and her parents, a sensibility that Warren Buffett seems to share: that at a certain point one has enough, that you can derive as much pleasure from a Picasso hanging in a museum as from one that’s hanging in your den, that you can get an awfully good meal in a restaurant for less than twenty dollars, and that once your drapes cost more than the average American’s yearly salary, then you can afford to pay a bit more in taxes.
More than anything, it is that sense—that despite great differences in wealth, we rise and fall together—that we can’t afford to lose. As the pace of change accelerates, with some rising and many falling, that sense of common kinship becomes harder to maintain. Jefferson was not entirely wrong to fear Hamilton’s vision for the country, for we have always been in a constant balancing act between self-interest and community, markets and democracy, the concentration of wealth