Jeffrey Quick's Blog

Die, and pay for somebody else to die

Taranto has some fun with this report of a Bil Clintoon speech:

Clinton . . . objected to the president's efforts to permanently repeal the estate tax. An estate tax on the richest one percent of Americans could raise $25 million to $40 million a year, enough to wipeout [sic] extreme poverty around the globe in a decade.

Hmm, let's assume the take from the death tax is at the high end of Clinton's estimate, or $400 million in a decade. How close would this come to wiping out extreme poverty? According to NetAid.org:

Over 1 billion people--1 in 6 people around the world--live in extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1 a day.

Let's assume they all live on 99 cents a day, and thus need only 1 cent a day to lift them out of extreme poverty. That means wiping out extreme poverty world-wide would require a billion cents, or $10 million, a day--so that a decade's worth of death-tax revenues would alleviate extreme poverty for just under six weeks--not counting the administrative expense of distributing those 40 billion pennies.

Now, if the taxman could get his hands on Warren Buffett's estate . . .

It's unclear whether this was AP editorializing, or a paraphrase of something Slick Willie said. Either way, they need to be held to account.

On the other hand, if that much money were used to buy assassination contracts on corrupt dictators and Marxists, it's entirely possible that the currently defined level of global poverty could be indirectly eliminated. If everone who didn't support economic freedom, property rights, and a stable economy got psychosurgery with a lead probe (and I do mean everyone...here too), the entire world could probably go on a 30-hour week and still be better off than they are now.

Not that that would make the death tax right...but it would at least make it useful. Especially since death tax supporters would eventually get a contract themselves.