I sense a few double standards present in the debate over Bidens’ historic Child Tax Credit proposal that would cut the child poverty rate by more than 40%.
My focus here is on a perhaps less obvious one but I think relevant: trust fund kids & the tax treatment of inheritances
Since the mid-1990s, as I’ll walk through, reducing the taxation of large inheritances has been a top, if not the top, tax policy priority of conservatives and Republicans.
In parallel, as I’ll also walk through, there has been a steady stream of research concluding that large inheritances reduce the work effort of wealthy heirs
Unless I’ve missed it, I’ve not sensed the type of concern about the work effects on wealthy heirs among conservative proponents of large tax-free inheritances, which we now see among some conservatives and Republican lawmakers around poor people and a larger Child Tax Credit
In 1997, as part of an agreement with Clinton, who secured wins to make health care more affordable for poor children and college tax credits, Gingrich won “reductions in capital gains and estate taxes that had been principal goals for the GOP.”