Comments on Dorf on Law: Death and Journalism

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For what it's worth, I think the two grounds r...

2009-12-10T14:27:08.868-05:00

For what it's worth, I think the two grounds raised here by Mike for objecting to the term are plenty compelling, but I think the term itself inherently misleading as well. For it suggests in a peculiar sort of way that death is itself what is being taxed, rather than the huge estates that a remarkably small percentage of people pass on when they die. ('Income-taxes' tax income; 'sales-taxes' tax sales; so 'death-taxes' tax ... death?)

Inasmuch as people in general fear death, the suggestion raised by the internal syntax of a term like 'death-tax,' to the effect that this putative misfortune (death) is, on top of it all, in effect also 'punished' by being 'taxed,' seems to me calculated to foment outrage at the tax as a form of 'piling on.' The term seems, in other words, to be designed with a view to misdirecting the gaze of those who hear or read it, from the real object of taxation -- huge estates that are not usually earned by their recipients and tend to create longterm class divisions between rentiers and working stiffs (pun foreseen but not intended) -- to the false object that is death.

Lovely post and comment, by the way -- thanks!
Bob

I agree that "death tax" is a politicall...

2009-12-10T13:57:47.232-05:00

I agree that "death tax" is a politically loaded term that was deliberately concocted to weaken support for the federal estate tax. That said, I don't see it as INHERENTLY dishonest as a matter of the wording. What's misleading about the term is that it apparently leads to the false perception that just about everyone who dies is subject to the tax. But one could say the same thing about the "income tax." Not everyone who earns income is subject to it, because some people earn too little to be taxed. So the problem here is either the scale of the misimpression--a higher percentage of people who earn income pay income tax than the percentage of people who die that have a federal tax levied on their estates--or the pedigree of "death tax," rather than the wording per se.