Death Taxes and the Food Supply

The Senate voted along party lines to defeat a motion to prevent reinstatement of the federal estate tax at the old rate of 55% next year. A two-thirds majority was needed to suspend frequently-convenient Senate rules to allow the Solons to consider legislation to repeal the tax permanently. Or, as permanently as any tax is ever repealed in Washington.

Living on a farm, we have always butchered our own meat. The government has NO right whatsoever to tell us that we cannot.

Regarding the death tax ...there must be some way around this by giving property title to children before death....or selling it to them ahead of time. I wish the lawyer Freepers would comment on this.

There is. It's called a trust. Basically a private legal partnership that owns all the assets and survives the death of any (or even all) of its members. Transfer your assets to a trust, become a director of the trust who receives a monthly salary from the proceeds of the trust (the trust can turn a profit, after all), and you can at least avoid the estate tax.

For now. Who knows what will happen in the future...

The “share the wealth” crowd needs to realize that destroying the source of production, private sector jobs, and the local tax base is too high a price to pay for the windfall of eating the dead

The commies in the Demonrat Party aren't just after a short-term gain in govt. revenue. They want to confiscate the wealth of "the rich" white folks and transfer it to the political nomenklatura and their supporters. Socialism has never been about benefiting the poor; it's a newer version of the ancient game of creating a new elite by pillaging the assets of the old natural elite.

You can avoid probate but I don’t think you can avoid estate taxes with a trust. The estate tax is completely unfair. You pay the taxman 30%+ every year and when you die they want another 55% on the inflated value. Why work hard? When my Dad bought land for $100/acre a quarter section would buy approximately 3 Corvettes. When land moved to $800/acre you could still only buy 3 Corvettes. In other words the purchasing power stayed the same. This is why the estate should at least be indexed for inflation. The estate tax is going to finish off a lot of farmers by forcing them to sell land to pay estate taxes.

Living on a farm, we have always butchered our own meat. The government has NO right whatsoever to tell us that we cannot.

Wrong.

The commerce clause became the carte blanche for social legislation through a series of cases upholding New Deal legislation in the 1930s and 1940s. In those cases the Supreme Court interpreted the clause as permitting Congress not just to regulate commerce (actual interstate trade in goods and services), but also to regulate anything that had a “substantial effect” on commerce. The watershed case which held that Congress could regulate purely private, individual, and noncommercial conduct was Wickard v. Filburn (1942).

In its simplest terms, Wickard held that Congress had authority under the interstate commerce clause to prohibit Filburn, the owner of a small farm, from growing, storing, and consuming his very own wheat on his very own property. For this reason, it is often selected by libertarians (and occasionally conservatives) as a patent illustration not only of the Supreme Court’s egregious failure to uphold the Constitution, but also of the now nearly unlimited scope of congressional power.

Yet a close reading of the case redirects attention away from the Supreme Court as the villain responsible for the loss of limited government, and reveals more precisely the reason for that loss. More troubling still, a close analysis of Wickard indicates why term limits, balanced budgets, prohibitions on unfunded mandates, or similar institutional devices will not re-establish limited government, and points to the daunting nature and magnitude of the reform necessary to limit government power.

How the Commerce Clause Became the Loophole that Eviscerated the Tenth Amendment

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