Splendid Isolation

Here’s a little snippet that caught my eye briefly, then buzzed around in my subconscious until it turned into a raging tornado.

Inheritance tax receipts increased to £5.2billion in the eight months from April to November, data from HM Revenue & Customs reveals.

This marks a £400million increase from the same period a year ago, and continues the upward trend over the last decade.

Last month, the Chancellor shied away from slashing inheritance tax in the Autumn Statement, as it emerged the levy is on track to raise nearly £10billion a year by the end of the decade.

The body text concerns me hardly at all because it’s Britishland, and for centuries their governments have always stolen from the country’s wealthier citizens.

It was really just the first two words which snagged me like an errant fish hook.

Here’s how it’s defined by our own beloved IRS:

The Estate Tax is a tax on your right to transfer property at your death. It consists of an accounting of everything you own or have certain interests in at the date of death. The fair market value of these items is used, not necessarily what you paid for them or what their values were when you acquired them.

There are a whole bunch more words which on the surface are supposed to clarify the matter, but which in true IRS form serve only to create more questions, to be clarified by tax accountants and lawyers, and which can be re-interpreted (in the State’s interests, natch) by IRS agents in any way they choose.

Yeah, you have a right to transfer property — your own private property, how nice that they call it a “right” — but that right can be taxed (is it then still a right?) because reasons.

Basically, the State is saying that your private property isn’t really yours, it belongs to the State and therefore they are entitled to a piece of it.

Yeah, I know, it really only applies to “the rich” and we little peasants shouldn’t worry our silly little heads about it.  (The ceiling for application of the death tax is currently set at an estate value greater than $13.6 million.)

Even among people not affected by the estate tax, it is one of the most hated taxes in the nation.  Worse still, it used to cost the State more in the collection thereof than the income it generated — in fact, it only recently “broke even”, and now the revenue : cost relationship stands at something like 1.24 ($1.24 dollars is collected for every dollar it costs to collect it).

If ever there’s a piece of governmental thievery which needs to be taken outside and shot in the back of the neck, this one is it.  (Don’t even ask me about the politicians who support it and the government agents who collect it, because my response would put me on the Naughty List.)

Yes I know, there is a difference between “inheritance” taxes and “estate” taxes.  Regardless of how the godless IRS defines it or how/when it gets collected, however, the principle is the same for both.