Inheritance Tax

[cwelsch]

The real cost of the estate tax is that it hurts small business owners.  They have money on paper but realistically don't make enough in cash to pay the estate tax.  So what happens is somebody owns a store or a ranch but brings in under $100k a year, they can't pay the estate tax like that, they have to sell off the family business or go to jail.

This is especially an issue as more and more minority business owners lose their businesses to the estate tax, thus keeping people (in this case, minority former business owners) unduly poor.

[cwelsch]

Of wage earners?  That's very different from assets.  There are plenty of people so rich they do nothing but collect interest on investments (no problem with that).

[cwelsch]

Why don't we just run the feds with a couple lotteries and donation drives?  Imagine Cheney or Edwards on stage running a telethon.

[cwelsch]

That's somewhat true, but it's largely been shown through the record that the Americans deeply resented the taxes no matter where they came from because they were very bad for business.  The fact that the English put them down only stressed the fact that the English had no clue how to run us and that we couldn't stop them.

So it was bipartite.  It was that they were there and that we couldn't stop them.  If the taxes hadn't been there, we cared much less - as with the decades prior to the Seven Years' War and salutary neglect.

When the British didn't do anything much to us, next to nobody even considered secession, and up until 1775 virtually every American was explicitly and intensely loyal to the King but all (incuding the US Tories) hated Parliament.  When we realized that they could do something to us that as both so damaging and, at least to us, completely unnecessary, we got pissed off.  The fact that we could never be able to change it and that parliament refused to allow us an American parliament only cemented the cause.

It was also related to the countless customs and fees placed on us, which is why innumerable British and royal customs agents were tarred and feathered or placed on lampposts for the night or in the most extreme cases (where an American royal customs agent slapped up a kid in the street) they broke into your house.  But most of that was in Boston in the mid-1770s.

There are plenty of other reasons for the revolution (many related to the soldiers in our towns and homes or the customs agents raiding US ships for money) but it was to a large degree the economic control the British sought to establish over us.  Then of course the Intolerable Acts and the blockade of Boston harbor was considered practically a war crime throughout the colonies, even in the South where the Boston Tea Party was considered an illegal, immoral act.

The Parliament wanted a piece of the economic pie after it had countless reports from soldiers of the Seven Years' War that showed that almost all Americans were wealthier than the average Englishman.  Americans didn't want to be forced into the British trade regime and didn't want to pay taxes - especially taxes to raise revenue.

There was a very specific argument used, and it was simple: if you had a tax to pay for some government service, that was okay; if you had a tax simply to raise revenue, that was considered EXTREMELY illiberal (almost ridiculous to anybody but a libertarian, really) and flat-out unacceptable; if you had extra revenue raised from a user fee or a service tax then that was considered okay.  So in actuality, the colonists were very anti-tax in general, and hated having their trade controlled and ships subject to British royal customs agents.

If the British had been doing good or at least neutral things then we wouldn't have cared.  Like building roads would have been fine, the Seven Years' War was almost completely unnecessary but didn't especially hurt the Americans so it was neutral, but restricting trade through taxes was bad.  The fact that it was bad is what excited the Revolution - well that and all the other horrible stuff that followed in the confusion and hysteria as the Parliament tried to hang onto the best colony in the Empire.

It's also important to note that the original justification for the taxes was 1) raise revenue to 2) establish and staff British military bases even though the French were already gone.  This was supposedly done for the protection of the colonists, but realistically it was done to stop them from moving west (countless homes were burned by the British soldiers to stop westward expansion but the homes were actually built faster than they could be burned).  The Americans hated this, because it meant in essence they had to pay for troops they 1) didn't want after 2) the British won a war that Americans didn't give a damn about (the Seven Years' War was an imperial war) and 3) the troops' most obvious use was only against the Americans, the same people paying to house them there.  Obviously this was not accpetable.  And the fact that taxes were for raising revenue, again, was widely considered to be illiberal hence wrong, even by the Tories.  Actually, the main difference between Tories and Whigs/Rebels was whether you supported the King, since virtually all Americans believed that Parliament was destructive of liberty and the taxes and blockade were injustices against Americans.  The Tories just thought it could be resolved, the Whigs didn't, but they were all of more or less the same ideology otherwise (Paine and other classical liberals were almost unanimously read, nearly as widely supported).



Anyway, it was two-part.  If the taxes hadn't been so bad then we wouldn't have cared nearly so much about being represented to make them.  We liked the salutary neglect for decades before all that mess when the british left us alone, and we accepted that we couldn't be represented in Parliament or have our own parliament.  once they did horrible things like the taxes we clamored for repeal or representation.

Revolutionary America, by almost any standard, was very anti-tax.