Grassley: shaming people who supposedly spend every penny they have on "booze, women or movies."
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/media/cinematic/video/108311880/full-audio-chuck-grassley-on-booze-women/
Listen to the whole video. How many people do you know who make $100,000 a year and spend it all on "booze, women or movies"?
Think about that.
And as for family farms. Can you imagine a teacher being able to bequeath his teaching job to his favorite son or daughter, most likely son?
I know how hard farmers work. But they often, maybe even usually, INHERIT land, a scarce commodity in this day and age. Thomas Jefferson made sure that primogeniture would not be allowed in our country, but a farmer can bequeath the farm to just one of his children if he wishes, and that child's siblings may have to make it on their own. This is one of life's injustices. Taxing iheritances makes sure that the system is a little fairer.
"With Thomas Jefferson taking the lead in the Virginia legislature in 1777, every Revolutionary state government abolished the laws of primogeniture and entail that had served to perpetuate the concentration of inherited property. Jefferson cited Adam Smith, the hero of free market capitalists everywhere, as the source of his conviction that (as Smith wrote, and Jefferson closely echoed in his own words), "A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural." Smith said: 'There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death.'"
https://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2010/10/estate_tax_and_founding_fathers
The Founding Fathers must be turning over in their graves at the passage of the recent tax bill that "serve(s) to perpetuate the concentration of inherited property."
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