Far left presidential candidate’s embrace of 65% estate tax highlights tax’s true pedigree.

(Alexandria, Virginia) — The non-partisan 60 Plus Association, America’s largest center-right seniors advocacy organization with over 7.2 million supporters nationally, today issued a statement blasting Socialist/Democrat Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders for his proposal to hike the death tax to a top rate of 65% and lower the exemption by 30%. Currently the top rate sits at 40%.

Citing income inequality, which has expanded rapidly under President Obama’s economic policies, Sanders justified his plan saying, “This is a piece of legislation that addresses what I consider to be the most significant moral issue of our time.”

The response was swift from 60 Plus Chairman Jim Martin, one of the nation’s acknowledged leaders in the movement to abolish the death tax, a movement that saw the successful passage in the House in April of legislation calling for the tax’s complete and total repeal.

“The death tax has a true friend in socialist Bernie Sanders, which tells you everything you need to know about what the death tax stands for, and what it does. While more than 70% of Americans consistently poll against the death tax, old school leftists and socialists cling to it like a shipwrecked man to a life raft. Too bad nobody told Bernie Sanders that life raft is in reality a tomb stone.”

Martin frequently cites studies from both conservative and liberal economists, from Douglas Holtz-Eakin on the right, to Ed McCaffery on the left, who point out that the death tax actually hurts the poor, kills jobs, eliminates upward mobility, destroys savings, rewards conspicuous consumption and slows our economy — all while adding extremely little in terms of revenue to the Treasury.

“Poor Bernie Sanders, he’s stuck in the past with the policies that made Cuba and East Germany such prosperous and thriving economic juggernauts. Confiscatory inheritance taxes is #3 on Communism’s top 10 planks, which is why the vast majority of Americans oppose it. Socialists have yet to explain how higher government taxes ever benefit the poor. It benefits government, it benefits bureaucrats, it benefits dictators, but the poor bear the brunt through generations of suffering in a malodorous, stagnant economy. The death tax has a friend with Bernie Sanders and other socialists, but most Americans un-friended the death tax a long, long time ago.”

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