A West Wing friend called to say the president heard about the article as he walked from the Oval office of the OEOB. He was angry. "Well," he yelled through the stairwell, "is he right or isn't he? Have we done compassion or haven't we? I wanna know."
An hour later we got the first and only call from the deputy chief of staff Josh Bolton's office requesting an urgent "compassion meeting." In the two years since the transition, it was the first time the president's senior staff fully engaged in the compassion agenda....
The president's question first needed to be answered. He wanted to know how much we had spent on compassion programs in his first two years in office. We made some calls and did some calculations and discovered that if we applied his definition of compassion to federal social services programs, we were actually spending about $20 million a year less on them than before he had taken office. That number never actually made it to the president. The question was deemed, "still in process of being accounted for."
Comments Crowley: "Remember, Bush's entire 2000 campaign was organized around the "compassionate conservative" theme. Yet midway through his first term, Bush had no idea whether he was living up to his label--and his aides wouldn't even tell him the truth was quite the opposite."
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And it isn't a matter of feelings. I'm not stating what you should or shouldn't have a right to. I'm not talking about the government here. I'm talking sheer reality.
Nobody has a 'right' to inheritance, or they wouldn't bother with wills, and parents and spouses wouldn't be allowed to spend or sell, while alive, their assets for their own use.
The closest we have to that arrangement was common with aristocratic families in England, where landed estates (of the title variety) were frequently 'entailed', so that family couldn't sell it and couldn't control who it was inherited by. But even that arrangement was made usually by one ancestor or another.>
Examples of why inheritance is NOT a buffer. If you were to have an emergency now, you don't have access to that money. It can't buffer you. Even expected expenditures, like college for children, you can't count on it, because your mother could well be alive when your children go to college. Given lifespan increases, she could be alive when her GRANDCHILDREN go to college.
So how, exactly, can it be a 'buffer' if you have no idea if it'll be there when you actually need it?
Savings is a buffer. Assets you OWN currently can be buffers. Hard currency, your own real estate, etc. If you mother is in good terms, then you might be still able now to have her assets as a buffer, though that's her decision.
But you can't count a possible inheritance, when you don't know the amount, or the time it will be available not due to the big, mean government, but because of the nature of life, and the character of an inheritance.
So I fail to see what my politics or my worldview have to do with it. That would still be the case if there were no estate tax, or indeed, no taxes whatsoever.>
Oh, and if your point is that you're not rich and your life is directly affected, I say its not.
If you were actually making plans based on a certain inheritance amount in the first place, considering the vagaries of life itself, that's not wise.
All it'd take is one extended illness or other need of your mother, or indeed, one of her children that she provides for, and it wouldn't have been around anyway.
Assuming that she wills it to her children, which, indeed, is not a certainty anyway.>
Oh, I do have a way for a 'buffer'. But it'd take (estate tax or not) lawyers too. Some form of trust fund, or, as the Brits used to do, have the land entailed.
Of course, if you were to do that, the only buffer would be the income the land could provide, since entailed land can't be sold.>
Excuse me, everyone.
I've been busy lately. A while back, I asked Evan (not Evans) to provide factual support for his earlier statements about the estate tax and stock ownership.
Has Evan offered these facts?
If not, does anyone know why?>
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