House votes repeal of Estate Tax - Paris Hilton will never have to work

From the New York Times today.

Filed at 7:46 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- House Republicans on Wednesday pushed to make permanent a one-year reprieve on estate taxes, a change that Democrats said would reward the wealthiest families and increase the federal deficit by tens of billions of dollars annually.

Current laws would eliminate the estate tax in 2010, only to resurrect it the following year. Republican lawmakers want to keep the repeal in place, decreasing government revenue by roughly $290 billion over a decade.

''Eliminating the death tax is a matter of basic fairness,'' President Bush said.

Amy Sullivan writes at Kevin Drum's Political Animal:

House Republicans voted overwhelmingly to permanently repeal the estate tax--at a cost, let's remember, of nearly $300 billion over the next decade.

So, to sum up: Actual prescription drug relief? There's no money. Armor to protect our troops? There's no money. The funds to back up the mandated reforms of No Child Left Behind? There's no money. Doing away with a tax on super rich kids? Plenty o' cash to spare.

Not only is this giving money to those who don't need it, the money will be borrowed by the federal government so that it increases the federal deficit. That means that paying the treasury bonds held by the Social Security Trust Fund becomes more difficult, at exactly the time the baby boomers are stressing the system.

Bush and our Congress are intentionally working to make life more difficult for Americans in the next half century. It really only works if they are insane, severe Paris Hilton fans, or if they are religious fundamentalist premillennialists.