Home › Blogs › James's blog ›

Poor billionaires

Submitted by James on Thu, 06/08/2006 - 2:03pm



George W. Bush's efforts to repeal the estate tax went down in flames today in the Senate. This diary at Daily Kos has the details. If you read through the comments, you'll see a note about the number of people in Washington State who would be affected by the tax: 1.5%. Does anyone know how we might calculate such a figure for North Carolina? It would be interesting to ask Richard Burr and Elizabeth Dole, two of the suckiest senators in US history, why they voted to help X percent of North Carolina's silver spooners get even richer at a time when the government will be running record-breaking deficits as far as the eye can see.

Tagged:

Comments

Thank god for small favors.

Submitted by James on Thu, 06/08/2006 - 4:25pm.

Every time I see how our two senators vote, I wonder why we just don't have a couple of pre-programmed robots up in DC instead of two brainless carbon-based life forms. It would be a hell of a lot cheaper for We the People.

Now that I think it through, we DO have a couple of preprogrammed robots in Dull and Burr.

To find number affected

Submitted by TarGator on Thu, 06/08/2006 - 8:14pm.

I can only think of long labor intesive methods. The problem is that wealth, unlike income, is rarely if ever required to be reported. Also, wealth is much easier to hide or disguise than income. One method might be to:
You could search all probated estates in NC's 100 counties. Figure out how many are above the threshold and then divide by the number of deaths that year.