If you haven’t already done so, please make your way to Right Behind and bow before the glory of the Legendary Write-Off. The instructions:
Write a manual or guide of no more than 500 and no less than 300 words describing the procedures involved in preparing a sandwich of your choice.
This is a competition and not merely an exhibition but still, please, no wagering.
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The Billionaire Murders of 2010
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett, the third richest man in the world, testified yesterday at a Senate Finance Committee hearing on estate tax reform. Testify, brother Buffet, testify!:
Warren Buffett thinks those who use the phrase “death tax” are intellectually dishonest because the phrase in his words is “clever, Orwellian and dead wrong.”
The billionaire investor has been an outspoken critic of efforts to repeal the estate tax and in testimony at a Senate Finance Committee estate tax hearing on Wednesday, he told lawmakers that you’d have to attend 200 funerals to be at one where the family of the deceased would owe estate tax.
Buffett said if anything the estate tax is a “death present” because heirs figure their capital gains on inherited assets based on the price when they inherited them rather than when the decedent bought them. …
The intellectually dishonest Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the committee’s ranking Republican, responded by continuing to use the made-up and inaccurate phrase “death tax” throughout the hearing, thus demonstrating that he is “Orwellian and dead wrong,” but not particularly clever.
“I believe in keeping equality of opportunity,” said Buffett. “You don’t get to be a quarterback … because your father was a quarterback 20 years ago.”
Citing these comments from the world’s third-most-successful capitalist will inevitably result in comments below accusing Comrade Buffett of “socialism.” Please feel free to cut out the middle man and send those comments directly to his office at Berkshire Hathaway.
Regardless of one’s position on the merits or demerits of dynastic plutocracy, sane people on all sides of this issue can agree that the current situation is absurd:
Under current law, estates worth up to $2 million this year and next will be exempt from federal estate tax, and portions of an estate above that amount would be taxed at 45 percent.
By 2009, the exemption level rises to $3.5 million, and by 2010 the estate tax will be repealed for one year.
Come 2011, the tax will be reinstated, with an exemption level of $1 million and a top rate of 55 percent.
This suggests — no, requires — a movie to be made. A black comedy set in 2010, perhaps incorporating the quasi-documentary style of the E! television “reality” shows featuring heiresses and heirs desperate to trade wealth for fame. The plot would, of course, involve a rash of suspicious accidents taking the lives of multi-millionaires, resulting in a tax-free windfall for their unconvincingly grieving children. I picture a suspenseful big finale set at a New Year’s Eve party in a Manhattan penthouse. (As a kind of meta-joke, you could cast Paris Hilton to play a Paris Hilton-type in the movie, but I’m not confident she has the acting range to pull it off.)
On the other hand, the crazy-quilt of year-by-year changes in the estate tax between now and 2010 also provides a potentially useful framework for studying the effect of these changes on charitable giving. Here’s hoping the folks at Independent Sector are tracking this.
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The Center for Responsible Lending has been looking at the potential consequences of the Subprime Spillover. Lorainne Mirabella and Jamie Smith Hopkins of The Sun summarize their findings in “Ripple effect is feared from foreclosures“:
The center’s report estimates about a third of homes nationwide — or 44.5 million homes — will see property values drop by an average $5,000 two to three years after the foreclosures of loans originated in 2005 or 2006. It estimates the total loss at $223 billion. …
So here’s another question: If post-bubble or post-subprime mess property values do, indeed, drop by something like $200+ billion, what will that mean for school districts dependent on those property values for the tax base that funds their budgets? It seems likely that quite a few art and music teachers could wind up joining former Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O’Neal in the unemployment line.
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Homework blegging
Speaking of science that a layperson (or, at least, this layperson) can’t easily follow, it was somewhat encouraging to read the following, from the Wikipedia entry on Barbara McClintock:
Her work on controlling elements and gene regulation was conceptually difficult and was not immediately understood or accepted by her contemporaries.
Nor was it immediately understood by this blogger when called upon to try to explain it for his girlfriend’s seventh-grade daughter. Barbara McClintock was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983 “for her discovery of mobile genetic elements.”
“What does that mean?” I am asked. Ah, hmm. Well.
The good news is that her report is not due until after Thanksgiving, so I still have time to appeal to the hive-mind of the blogosphere for a way of explaining McClintock’s contributions to science in simple language that even a seventh grader and/or a journalist/theology student/blogger can understand.
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