buffet and the inheritance tax

From AlterNet.com:.

Billionaire Warren Buffett testified before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday in defense of the federal estate tax, the nation's only tax on inherited wealth.

Buffett invoked the historical roots of the estate tax, established in 1916 during the Gilded Age to put a brake on anti-democratic concentrations of wealth and power. "Dynastic wealth, the enemy of meritocracy, is on the rise," Buffett told the panel. "Equality of opportunity has been on the decline. A progressive and meaningful estate tax is needed to curb the movement of a democracy toward plutocracy."

Buffet gets it. This taxation is needed as a means of preventing the rich from passing their throne down to their children, and then their grandchildren, and then their great grandchildren. In the past our culture knew of the risks of allowing too much private economic power to accumulate in the hands of the few; so many of us have lost that lesson.

Republican Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, complained that "the death tax" was "fundamentally wrong." Buffett responded that use of the phase "death tax" was "intellectually dishonest" and "clever, Orwellian and dead wrong."

Has Buffet been reading Lakoff? The theory is that the phrase "death tax" cuts out the reality of this taxation by putting the emphasis on taxation following death instad of taxation preceding inheritance.

who did cookie really call?

From ThinkProgress:

Last week, House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) announced that he will hold a hearing after Thanksgiving recess to investigate discrepancies between statements on Blackwater by State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard and those of his brother. Howard Krongard’s lawyer has now written to Waxman and asked him to cancel the hearing. “There is no legitimate purpose to be gained by publicly pitting two brothers against each other,” Barbara Van Gelder wrote.

This is clearly just an early effort by Krongard's lawyer to put a spin of irrelevency on Waxman's investigation. If there is a discrepency where two individuals of such close ties are seen as possibly coordinating activities between private and public institutions for personal gain, there's simply no way it should be left uninvestigated.

Of course, assuming Waxman does the work of the people and invetsigates these clowns, we can expect that they're going to plead to plausible deniability. I'm willing to bet that if we looked into Howard "Cookie" Krongard's phone records, we'd find out that the call he made during a break in a congressional hearing was not to his brother, it was to his lawyer, and he was seeking pre-emptive advice on how to avoid go to prison.