Thursday, the House will vote on HR1105, the Death Tax Repeal Act of 2015.  This is one of the most unfair taxes on the books, taxing assets and cash that have already been taxed several times along the way.  The bill has 135 co-sponsors, 134 of whom are Republican; kudos to Sanford Bishop of Georgia.

The Democrats would have you believe that the tax falls primarily on the exceedingly wealthy, and so is designed to prevent the concentration of multigenerational wealth.  Perhaps the reason the tax has been such a dismal failure in preventing income inequality is that its premise is so flawed.  The very wealthy have any number of strategies available to them to avoid paying the tax.  Does anyone think Chelsea Clinton is going to go do productive work any time soon?

In the meantime, the tax absolutely crushes asset-rich/cash-poor businesses and farms, of the kind held by successful, but not opulent, families. Often, the choice is between selling assets (and usually it’s the bigger businesses that gobble these up), and taking a loan out.  Rep. Kristi Noem (R-SD) appeard on Fox News to discuss the bill.  Her family had to take out a 10-year loan to pay the death tax bill when her father was killed in an accident on the farm.

How long before Obama or Elizabeth Warren or Hillary!™ takes a page out of the student loan debacle and decries banks making unfair profits off of families’ misfortune, and demands that the government take over making those loans.