Playing Politics

This is funny...

Towards the end of last week, Blanche Lincoln and Jon Kyl got a lot of attention for their proposal to lower the estate tax and save the wealthiest 0.28 percent of estate owners about $440 billion over 10 years. Think Progress and others angrily noted the amendment's victory. "The Senate narrowly passed the bill by a 51-48 vote," sighed Satyam Khanna.

Well, sort of. The Senate narrowly passed something called the "Deficit Neutral Reserve Fund for Estate Tax Relief." This did not reform the estate tax. Rather, it reserved the right to reform the estate tax at some later date. It's a budget gimmick, not a bill.

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This was, in other words, a cost-free vote. Deficit-neutral reserve funds also serve a non-budgetary purpose: They allow you to insert a priority in the budget without actually passing or paying for it. Blanche Lincoln can now go to her constituents and explain that she built estate tax relief into the budget. That's true even as no one actually experiences any estate tax relief and the Senate does nothing to actually fund the policy. This proposal, in other words, was evidence that Blanche Lincoln, Jon Kyl, and 49 of their colleagues thought it extremely important to be on record supporting a $440 billion tax cut for the wealthy, not that they're actually going to pass the tax cut.

Ezra Klein's blog entry points out the idiocy of the Republicans. Apparantly "going throught the motions" is enough in their crazed right wing minds to count as political action. And the really cruel joke is that in the midst of this new Gilded Age, these right wing nuts feel that the rich are not rich enough and still need more tax breaks to enable them to pile the wealth up even higher. Pathetic.