Estate Tax

Who said the following: "The man of great wealth owes a particular obligation to the state, because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.”?


Lenin?

Trotsky?

Castro?

Kim Jong Il?



Surely it wasn’t a famous republican, right??



Wrong.

In an excellent op-ed by Tim Rutten in the L. A. Times today, he points out that Theodore Roosevelt, one of the more famous and beloved of Republican Presidents (and the speaker of the above gem), was also one of the first and most dedicated advocates for a strong and progressive estate tax. That’s right…the same one that his party in their current incarnation has renamed the “death tax” and has been railing against ever since. You know, the one they finally managed to seriously undercut in this BAD (for the country that is, not the wealthy/GOP) tax deal that the Republicans managed to blackmail out of Obama in exchange for allowing the nation's unemployed to not lose their only lifeline at Christmas.

Mr. Rutten makes a number of excellent points relating to wealth disparity and the new tax bill that President Obama just signed. I couldn’t have said it better myself, so I decided to just link to that piece from here:

(And the rich get richer...)

Hmm....Estate Taxes, Conservation, love of nature, National Parks...
seems to me that if Teddy were alive today, he'd be a Democrat.