Tax experts

NPR had a tax specialist on Fresh Air yesterday to give us the “truth” about McCane and Omaba’s tax proposals. I had several problems with his expertise: 1) He kept using the words “bigger/smaller” and “more/less” without explaining if he meant a raw figure or a percentage. Ex: McCane’s proposal would result in bigger tax savings for the upper income bracket. Does he mean they would save more in absolute terms or that they would be able to save a bigger percentage? 2) He frequently referred to low, middle, and upper incomes without telling us where he made the demarcation. Is $50,000.00 annually low, middle, or upper? Where is 30K? etc. 3) He was rather blasé about estate taxes claiming that the dead don’t need their money any longer. This would be a fine argument IF all we are talking about taking was the liquid assets of the deceased. However consider the following: Family farm of 1000 acres in the bottom land near Labadie, Missouri; been in the family 150 years; currently owned by little old widow who share crops it, land in Labadie is on the very boarder of suburban St. Louis and has shot up in assessed valuation because it is now prime subdivision land. Little old widow dies and the land becomes her estate, administered by her farmer son. They are farmers and don’t have a lot of liquidity, either in the son or the estate, however the value of the family farm’s LAND shoots the total estate value over into the millions of dollars, triggering estate tax; triggering a LOT of estate tax. The estate and the heirs of course don’t have the CASH needed to pay the tax because the value is all tied up in land. In fact the only way the tax can be paid is to literally sell the farm to generate the cash to pay the tax. Now tell me the little old widow wouldn’t have cared about that. Of course Captain Harvard the tax expert just skipped right over that.