Grand Oligarchic Party: What the estate-tax vote tells us about the Republicans

Have you heard the news? Republicans are worried about the rise of economic inequality. We know because they told us. The party wants to spread the word that it stands with ordinary Americans and has plans to help them to move up the economic ladder and enjoy the fruits of the American Dream.

You've heard it before, you're going to hear it over and over again as we head into the 2016 presidential election cycle, and it's utter nonsense.

How do we know? Well, for one thing there's the revival by both Ted Cruz and Rand Paul of a proposal for a horribly regressive flat tax. If Cruz and Paul are too far right for you, there's the tax plan of nominal centrist Marco Rubio, which both cuts income taxes on the wealthy and eliminates capital gains taxes altogether.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

And then there's last week's vote in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives to eliminate the estate tax. (The bill passed 240-179, largely along party lines.)

The Democrats may embrace markets. They may not tax and regulate enough to please the left. But when it comes to finding ways to benefit the wealthy, they just can't compare to the Republicans. If you think that what America really needs is for the federal government to give the super-rich a big, wet, sloppy kiss, then the Grand Oligarchic Party is for you.

The vote to repeal the estate tax would be bad enough purely on fiscal grounds. Remember all the dire warnings from Republicans about deficits a few short years ago — how we were about to become Greece and default on our debt? Well, now they're apparently not too scared to pass a bill that would cost the Treasury $14.6 billion in the first year and $269 billion over 10 years. (They might have proposed spending offsets — meaning: cuts — to soften the blow, but they couldn't be bothered.)

So which is it? Do Republicans not care about deficits at all? Or do they merely care far, far more about letting moguls keep an ever-greater share of their wealth?

I mean, really: eliminating (not cutting: eliminating) the estate tax would be an enormous benefit to the richest Americans and do no discernable good for anyone else. The tax will likely be levied on just 5,400 estates this year — those worth more than $5.43 million for an individual and $10.86 million for a couple. That's just 0.2 percent of the year's anticipated deaths. Allowing those estates to be passed along to heirs without being heavily taxed (currently up to a 40 percent rate) will contribute to making the U.S. even more of an oligarchy than it already is, with very few people enjoying enormous advantages while the rest of the country struggles to get by.

When some people start the race of life a lap ahead, they inevitably win. And then their heirs start with an even bigger lead. That's the surest possible way to end up, not with a society based on equal opportunity for all, but with political and economic rule by an entrenched class of plutocrats, who with every generation rig the system more pervasively for their own benefit.

That must sound appealing to Republicans, since they favor a policy that would make it even more of a reality than it already is.

If GOP leaders truly cared about inequality, they would judge the estate tax a price worth paying, and they might even propose to raise it at the tippy-top — on estates worth more than, say, $50 million. That would do just a little bit to push back against burgeoning inequality, just a little bit to pull the U.S. back in a more egalitarian direction, with a playing field just a little bit more level.

But of course that isn't going to happen. The Republican Party is far too deep in the pocket of the very people who would feel the greatest pinch from such a hike. Instead, the GOP has once again shown its eagerness to do the bidding of the nation's tycoon class.

At least we can be grateful that they've saved us from having to work too hard to figure out where they stand.