Congress has imposed a levy on everything that can conceivably be taxed: income, sales, property, gasoline, and food– the list is endless. A tax is even extracted from fans who attend sports or other entertainment events, but a tax for dying? Seniors say, rather emphatically, that DYING SHOULD NOT BE A TAXABLE EVENT!

60 Plus devotes a substantial portion of its resources to eliminating this most unfair and most confiscatory of all taxes. It’s actually a revenue loser and a disincentive to job creation. It’s anti-family because nearly 90% of family-owned businesses don’t survive past the second generation. 60 Plus does not believe that dying should be a taxable event. We do not believe that families should have to deal with the Internal Revenue Service and the undertaker almost simultaneously!

Benjamin Franklin proclaimed: ” In this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.” However as a result of the “death” tax, you can add a third: taxes AFTER death.

If the label “death” tax seems uncommonly tasteless, let me assure you it has many other names much more grotesque, if you will, and all share one common thread. They were born out of a sense of frustration by the bizarre fact that the tax is triggered for no other reason than death itself.

Throughout history, various groups began pushing taxes on inheritance in order to achieve certain socially desirable end results: the ending of a concentration of wealth and assuring an additional source of income for government. The idea of limiting inheritance became a popular platform within some of the utopian socialist movements as a way to restrict control, and ownership of property.

Even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in “The Communist Manifesto” saw it as one of the key measures of the proletariat gaining political power in the more advanced countries through a series of attacks on private property including abolition of all rights of inheritance.

To those who claim “death” tax repeal is a “tax cut for the rich,” 60 Plus says, “that horse has long been dead, so please, dismount!” The wealthy have lawyers and accountants to protect their after-tax assets with trusts and foundations, and who can blame them? Even Oprah Winfrey has expressed her dissatisfaction with the realization that when she dies, Uncle Sam is first in line. As she lamented on her TV show, she found that fact “irritating,” to say the least.

Instead it’s actually small mom and pop businesses that are hurt the most. For instance the 88-year-old grandson of slaves, he testified before Congress and worked with 60 Plus to repeal the death tax, before he became too ill to travel.
The evidence is in for all to see. It is time for the death bell to be sounded for both the federal estate and state inheritance taxes.

That’s why the 60 Plus Association’s battle cry is that DYING SHOULD NOT BE A TAXABLE EVENT!