"End the Estate Tax," written in Science
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The estate tax is sometimes referred to as the "death tax", a title which does little to convey the horror of the "Put you in your unmarked grave and steal from your innocent orphaned children while they cry tax". Most taxes are trying to kill us, but the estate tax in particular has death right in the name. Fortunately there is an economist named Casey Mulligan who wrote a ground-breaking expose, all full of numbers, that utilizes the Scientific Method and several Punnett Squares to prove these previously unsubstantiated murderous urges. For starters:
The estate tax brings in only about $20 billion a year despite marginal tax rates that have varied from 45 to 55 percent, because of its large exemptions and many loopholes.
If there's one thing we can all agree on, it's that $20 billion is not much money in the grand scheme of the universe. For example, the U.S. has TRILLIONS of dollars. And the Earth has QUADRILLIONS of dollars! Who knows what kind of illions of dollars exist out in Deep Space. My point being, if the government is only making 20 billion bucks on something, why even bother? Every $20 billion dollars they receive should just be sent right back where it came from with a big old haughty "Um, thanks, but no thanks" note written in cursive on a silk notecard.
Maybe, though, Mr. Mulligan is not trying to say that $20 billion is a negligible amount of money that he'd sooner walk past on the street than waste precious energy bending over to pick up. Seems like he is just trying to point out that - hey! With that high tax rate, on the richest people in the country, shouldn't we get more than $20 billion out of it? Sounds to me like Comrade Mulligan is advocating a stricter estate tax, one that would eliminate a couple of those loopholes and provide more revenue. This makes no sense to me, because people who have just died should have control over what happens to all of their excess money!
Fortunately, Dr. Mulligan, Ph.D. of dollar signs, does not want that at all. He, like me, does not want to unfairly burden the hardworking zombie population of dead people who seek to control their fortune from beyond the grave. And he has a completely mathematical reason for it, like the part in My Beautiful Brain when Russel Crowe comes up with that equation which proves a tie is ugly. And the equation goes: semi-circle, angle, divide by square root of 2, OMG GENIUS IT IS SO UGLY. Anyway, here is the math reason:
The huge potential for avoidance behavior is exactly why the proposal is so damaging from an economic point of view. Taxes affect behavior, because taxpayers take steps to pay less tax.
Aside from having a way with the English language, Sir Mulligan of Stratford-on-Uppers here puts forth his central thesis: The estate tax is not worth having, because it is costly to society to have so many titans and tycoons and tie-understanders wasting their energy and money figuring out how to use loopholes. That time could be used for the betterment of society, and instead our Billionaire Brain Trust has to devote whole hours to figuring out how to get out of this tax! What a waste! I have heard from ALL of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, independently, that they do not have any free time at all! And who's to blame but starry-eyed democrats, foolishly believing that taxing the rich would result in the rich paying taxes.
The article goes on to use economic theory, based on theoretical happenings at theoretical companies, to demonstrate why, when a group of people tries to avoid being taxed, we should just stop taxing them to save everyone the hassle. Of course, we should note going in that economic theory models this behavior by assuming that individuals and businesses have perfect knowledge and understanding of legislation, and that all large institutions are so supremely well-managed and lacking in bureaucracy, they are able to instantly and completely alter their operations to pursue the absolute most profitable course of action. That is the one tiny assumption that economists make about literally every single situation! Which fortunately simplifies everything a ton. Phew.
Let's take this phone example. In the article, Mulligan says that a theoretical company he just made up, which sells only his favorite things and is located in Lando Calrissian's Cloud City (cool!), makes 1000 phone calls every day. Then the mean old government fartcarts come in and charge a 1 cent tax on each call. Well obviously the company has no choice but to try to evade this tax! Because that is how one handles taxes. So in Captain Mulligan's sexy fantasy company on Planet Perfect, CEO Hawking and CFO Batman are all, "fuck THIS noise. We will simply reduce the number of phone calls we make every day to 800. Now we will not have to give so much money to that miserly old public good douchebag."
In order to demonstrate how legitimate these example numbers are, below we have a chart designed to show non-economists just exactly what kind of serious chart-worthy shit they are fucking with:
CHART, BITCH *
*all numbers have been made up to demonstrate a point
I'm going to go ahead and consider how this Royal Decree, which was immediately spaketh from on high, would be implemented. Someone in charge could tell all the employees to make 4/5ths as many phone calls as they have in the past. The employees simply tally the number of calls they are making each day, and when they reach number 5, they have to use an alternate form of communication, such as e-mail, or yelling. This policy is easily instituted and enforced!
Let's even assume I am taking the whole 4/5 thing too far. 80% was just an example from Duke Mulligan! Now the company just wants to reduce the total number of phone calls by some amount. Why can't they merely ask the employees to make fewer phone calls? It would be like in World War II, when instead of instituting rations, the U.S. asked everyone politely if they could use a little less scrap metal, and we all pulled together to kill Hitler and Japan! Asking a large group of people to decrease their total use of a shared resource is a completely practical way to achieve Herr Mulligan's result.
Now that we have changed the number of phone calls our company makes by mere force of will, let's look at the damages that befall our helpless little Corporation. For example, "some customers might be lost because they were not called". Our meticulously managed made-up company created complete coordination of the entire workforce on the first issue, but now they are not calling important customers, on purpose, in order to reduce their Phone-a-friend Taxes! The company memo must've insisted that employees refrain from making all extremely important business calls in an effort to avoid paying a tax on it. Losing business is small potatoes if it means a marginal reduction in taxes!
Of course, if that happened, it would almost be like they were acting against their own best economic interests, which actually is something that companies made up of non-perfect-robot humans do. However, that is not something we can admit elsewhere in this theoretical set-up, because if we account for human error and unpredictability, there would be no way to reliably predict the economy's response to a given policy. And based on the last few years of extremely reliable economic prediction on the part of top economists, that is not the case at all!
After demonstrating the uber-lameness of taxing the vast storehouses of cash America's Captains of Industry and Bruce Jenners leave behind for their deserving, silicone progeny, General Mulligan puts a nail in the coffin with his concluding statement:
I agree that the estate tax’s best attributes do not derive from economic efficiency, but rather its contribution to the sport of envying some of the love-to-hate members of America’s rich.
Petty old envious public! Envying the hard-earned billions of hard-working people who worked so hard to earn insanely wealthy parents! This whole country full of bulllies is just making a sport of the rich for no reason at all except total meanness! That money doesn't mean anything to the government as some kind of silly currency that can be exchanged for goods and services for the betterment of the nation- no, no, the estate tax money goes in a special box in a safe with pictures Paris Hilton on it, where the crude, jealous populists who can only DREAM of dating Brandon Davis go to look at it and laugh and laugh. Nothing but a bizarre vendetta against blameless billionaires who were probably not 100% responsible, and maybe not even 90% responsible, for the huge job and income losses across the entire country.
And finally, we have a viable alternative for the Estupid tax:
If necessary, the small revenue loss could be recovered with a tiny increase in the rates of a broader-based tax, like the taxes on payroll or personal income.
We could make that same amount of money with a more efficient tax! Like say, if you just apply a tax to someone who is earning an income, rather than inheriting sacks full of cash wads. This will be more efficient, because the storied American Elite will not go around creating "excess burdens" by figuring out ways to avoid the taxes. I definitely want to save our nation from those excess burdens! Those burdens are probably the worst burdens around these days!
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On a final note, I would like to point out that the Murderous Murder Tax is costing our economy the valuable productivity of one Casey Mulligan, who could be carrying out the far more crucial work of eliminating all government inefficiency by putting an end to taxes entirely, and/or spreading them among the non-tax-lawyer having rabble, as punishment for their attempt to bring down the Overclass out of straight-up jealousy.
Ideal human
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