By Kiff LaBar-Shelton
Albuquerque Resident
NOT EVERYONE who gets hosed by estate taxes is a spoiled brat or a Paris Hilton. Some of us are hard-working, middle-class people who very much deserve to inherit all of the money earned and saved by our even harder-working ancestors.
My grandmother passed away several years ago. She was a Chicago union activist in the 1930s who played the piano and sang IWW anthems (I still have her little red songbook) as accompaniment for labor riots. She was not a "spoiled brat" by any means, and neither are any of her heirs.
My grandmother's father was a gardener and later a parks commissioner. He loved open space and bought up a considerable amount of cheap farmland in areas which are now some of the wealthiest suburbs of Chicago. When the 1940s housing boom came, he sold it and bought a lot of stock, much of it in "new technology" firms like IBM, GE and Boeing. Smart move. My grandmother inherited this stock and simply held onto it as it split and split again, growing and growing in value through the tech boom years of the 1970s and 1980s.
When she died, she had a cool couple million socked away. Her bankers (not to mention her family) begged her for 20 years to put the money in trust so it would not simply be lost to taxes when she passed away.
Good socialist and idealist that she was, she'd have nothing to do with tax shelters or trust funds. She felt the government deserved its piece. I'm not sure she ever comprehended that that piece would amount to some 55 percent of her family's hard-won fortune.
That 55 percent which was lost to estate taxes, and is now being spent willy-nilly on immoral wars and tax breaks for billionaire oil crooks, would have bought my mother a nice little house on the Maine coast or Cape Cod, where she's always wanted to live. It also would have let her retire sooner from her job as a children's librarian. And yes, it would have made her children's lives a little easier.
My sister's no Paris Hilton. She's a hospital pediatrician (no, grandma didn't pay her way through medical school) who works up to 80 hours a week. I have a degree in telecommunications and work for Verizon Wireless. I drive a Subaru and buy my clothes at Sears. There are no spoiled teenyboppers, BMWs or mansions anywhere in my family.
But boy, we sure wish we had the rest of grandma's money. We're not greedy, but we and our ancestors have all worked hard enough for long enough that we think we deserve a little piece of the American dream— a vacation home, a nice nest egg, dental insurance, a college fund for my sister's kids, a life free from debt, whatever.
I suppose if the government actually spent my grandmother's money responsibly, in the way she imagined it would, on social programs, education and health care for the poor, I wouldn't mind so much.
However, under the current administration, revenue from estate taxes is just money down a rathole. I'm sure my family could have come up with better uses for it than Donald Rumsfeld does.
What's really galling is the fact that the Paris Hiltons of the world, the really wealthy spoiled brats, get to keep the money. It's all in offshore tax shelters and trust funds.
The very rich do not get screwed by estate taxes. It's the upper middle class, whose ancestors lived through the Depression, and yanked themselves up out of abject poverty by their own bootstraps, who get burned.
Do the right thing. Repeal the "death tax." Not for the really wealthy, but for the millions of us who could be really wealthy a generation or two down the road, if only the government didn't rip us off and set us back 50 years every time the oldest members of our families die.
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