"...clearly, he cherry-picked a few ideas from the plan. That's not the whole plan..."
Besides the video only being a few minutes long, I acknowledged that in the OP:
"Obviously, the issues he asks them about are not the entire list of items within the tax bill, he isn't presenting it as if it is."
Of course, your cherry-picked statement is also true of every news report on the tax bill. They don't go into every detail of the tax bill when they are reporting on who it will help/hurt from their point of view. That doesn't necessarily make the limited sections they are discussing or their conclusions automatically wrong because they have not covered all the other details of the full bill. It just means that their reporting focuses on what they happen to think are the most important details to them and, more often than not, also happen to be sections that will help support their personal approval or disapproval of the bills passage.
When it comes to the Death Tax, it is, as liberals and progressives are fond of saying, simply an issue of fairness.
* Taxes have already been paid on that money.
* If someone has a principle belief that the government should Not be able to double tax people for what they didn't spend before they die, the amount they leave behind shouldn't matter.
* If a person believes the government Should be able to double tax what people leave behind, then, again, the amount left shouldn't matter. So even a person who only leaves $500 in his bank account when he dies should also be subjected to that same sort of "fair" government double taxation treatment, or rather, his heirs should be on their inheritance.
Basically, my take on the people in the video who agreed with the "Bernie" death tax version, that paying taxes once on the same money is more than fair, did so because that is a simple and straight forward argument and concept which is easily understood by most people. The only reason people add a dollar amount (or a financial class classification) to the same argument is because they want people to feel that they themselves have been cheated somehow if they don't happen to have that large of a bank account. Therefore, people arguing for the death tax can only get others to agree with them by using (income) class warfare and envy; not on the actual merits of what they believe to be the awesome double taxation concept itself. |
