The Cost Of Dying In 2013; It's more than you think

The New Face Of Tax Collectors

The 2001 tax relief bill (EGTRRA), drastically reduced the impact of the death tax over the course of a decade, so that it was eliminated entirely for one year in 2010, a good year to die. The bill lowered marginal rates and increased the applicable exclusion amount, but it also included a provision allowing individuals to carry over exclusion dollars that were unused by their spouse at the time of the rich persons death. This “portability” measure effectively increased the applicable exclusion for many households, in some instances putting millions of dollars beyond the reach of the federal government.

The death tax rose from the grave at the end of 2010, with a Bush-era top rate of 35% and an applicable exclusion amount of $5 million ($5.12 million in 2012).

Scheduled Changes

In 2013, the death tax will revert to its antiquated, pre-2001 form. The applicable exclusion amount will plummet to $1,000,000, and the top marginal rate will leap twenty points to 55%. A 5% surtax will also return, to be levied on estates between $10 million and $17 million. This raises the top effective rate of the death tax to 60%.

ATRF Analysis

According to research by the Tax Policy Center, if the current death tax expires, then the resulting, stricter exemption threshold will force 114,600 estates to file for the tax in 2013 — this represents a 13-fold increase from the previous year’s 8,800 estates, and countless wasted hours filling out tax paperwork. Of that cohort, an unfortunate 52,500 will be liable for the tax, way up from 3,300.

Milton Friedman

While those 52,500 taxpayers only represent 2% of those who die each year, no one should be fooled into thinking that the effects of this tax fall only on the proverbial “one percent.” The economic incidence of the death tax is far broader, because it causes many wealthy individuals to save less, choosing instead to retire early or, as Milton Friedman put it, “dissipate their wealth on high living.” This reduction in savings means a concomitant reduction in investment, lessening the flow of capital to businesses and organizations where countless ordinary Americans are employed.

Additionally, use of estate planning lawyers, life insurance trusts, and inter vivos gifting (all common practice in upper-income circles) allows many wealthy individuals to minimize their estate liability, so that the death tax ends up harming only those who could not or chose not to navigate a maze of legal loopholes. 

 Must view this video to better understand the gravity of our future tax burden

This is how the government takes the bulk of your money after you're dead

But the ills of a 55% death tax are not just speculative. Prior to 2001, when the death tax stood at 55%, a 1994 study by the Tax Foundation found that a 55% estate tax “has roughly the same effect on entrepreneurial incentives as a doubling of income tax rates.” The same death tax today, then, would have similar decision-distorting economic effects as an 80% income tax on affected parties. A 1992 study that was generally pro-redistribution piled on, finding that the paperwork and compliance costs of the estate tax largely cancelled out any revenue raised from the tax.

This consistent finding, that the death tax is effectively revenue neutral, and is a net economic drain exposes the class warfare aims of death tax advocates. The other reasons listed merely reinforce the point: that the death tax increase should be vigorously opposed.

A recent report from the Tax Foundation about the Estate (aka Death) Tax is receiving some publicity for the small amount of actual tax dollars at stake, as well as the fact that it costs more to enforce the laws than the tax generates. 

In a sane world, this would motivate our rulers to dispense with the Death Tax as too inefficient.  That misses the real reason behind the Estate Tax.

As I have been explaining for quite sometime now, two of the main planks of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto are Heavy Progressive Income Tax and Abolition of all rights of inheritance.  Both of these concepts are part of the DemonRat agenda, which is itself almost indistinguishable from Marx’s. 

However, the real world experience is that neither one of these concepts generates more money for the government.  Higher marginal tax rates actually result in less economic activity and less overall tax revenue, while lower rates encourage people to work more, with much higher revenues to the Treasury as a result. 

                          Why don't liberals understand this?

So why would the Dims be against higher government revenues?  It’s found in the first plank of the Communist Manifesto, Abolition of Private Property.  Their overall goal is to reduce the amount of wealth in private hands.  They would rather confiscate 90% of everyone’s income and have less government money than only take 15% with higher government revenues, because the latter would leave 85% of the income in private hands. Did you get that? Progressive liberals hate the fact that you are allowed to keep any of your money, so they invent slogans like "Pay your fair share and Tax the rich, feed the poor". 

The same goes for the Estate Tax.  They welcome any chance to reduce the amount of wealth in private ownership and couldn’t care less if it costs the government two dollars for every dollar they can confiscate from private owners.  Communism has never been a logical system, nor can it ever be, even in the hands of our supposed messiah, Barrack Hussein Obama, and his gang of Fellow Travelers.

While critics have dismissed Sarah Palin's "death panels" to dole out medical care as fiction, a tax loophole may in fact give the heirs of some wealthy people a financial incentive to make this new year their loved one's last.

For example, a wealthy person who dies on December 31, 2012, and left her heirs $10 million would really be leaving them $5.05 million because of taxes. If they died a day later, the heirs could receive less than 14% of the $10 million.

Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman appears to be the first to explain the potential pitfall for some elderly individuals, writing in May 2001 in the New York Times that it should have been called the "Throw Momma From the Train Act of 2001."

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Since then other economists have noted the impact tax changes might bring, including bestselling authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, who wrote in SuperFreakonomics that it would mean heirs would want their benefactors to make it to 2010, but not beyond.

"With this incentive, it's not hard to imagine such heirs giving their parent the best medical care money could buy, at least through the end of the year. Indeed, two Australian scholars found that when their nation abolished its inheritance tax in 1979, a disproportionately high number of people died in the week after the abolition as compared with the week before.

Not So Fast

Roberton Williams

To be sure, Congress could enact legislation to reinstate the estate tax and make it retroactive to the start of the year, so the notion of a wealthy family receiving a windfall by having a relative die in 2010 might be moot. But while many expect that to happen, "I thought there was no way we'd get to this point without having done something about 2010," said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute.

Although he said the estate tax would likely be restored in some form, part of the problem may be legislative priorities.

"If there are other issues like health care reform or cap and trade, this is relatively small potatoes, so who's going to use what political leverage is the name of the game."

Still, Williams said, people wanting to off themselves for their heirs' sake may want to make sure they make it far enough in this year to ensure nothing changes the law where they will be taxed anyway. "Death is a rather permanent thing," he said.

The estate tax has been a contentious issue, as it is perceived by some as a "double tax" -- since some assets are being taxed that were taxed previously.

Advocates of the tax point out that it only affects the wealthiest, and it prevents people from accumulating a windfall simply because their parents were wealthy.

Either eliminating the tax permanently or reinstating it would avoid the issue with the law as it stands now, but debate seems to have put it in place.

In 2001, a largely Republican coalition tried to repeal the estate tax permanently, but their majority could not get the bill past a filibuster, and so instead the changes were put into the tax code, meaning they had to be revisited after 10 years. So a gradual phase-out (done to keep some revenue flowing into the budget) and finally full repeal in 2010 would be reinstated in 2011.

"They anticipated that somewhere during the 10-year window they would just go back and repeal it completely," said Williams. "When they did this in the first place, they never thought 2010 would come around as being the only year. It was not intended that way; it was forced up on them by parliamentary rules in the Senate."

Indeed, it does not seem there was too much concern over the law when it came about.

Dr. Paul McHugh

Dr. Paul McHugh, the former chairman of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, served on the President's Council on Bioethics under Bush. He said that while the idea that people would attempt to die by Dec. 31, 2012 to avoid a tax was discussed casually by members, it was never part of official meetings.

"We certainly didn't discuss this in a serious fashion," said McHugh. "There was a kind of presumption that the idea that taxing people again and again would eventually be seen as unfair."

"They thought that was going to be an unstable proposition," he said of the tax law, adding that he feels "It's going to be hard to bring it back without something of a fuss."

The estate tax only affects the wealthiest; roughly 1 person in 400 pays the estate tax when they die, and only about 5,500 estates are expected to owe estate taxes this year, according to the Tax Policy Institute.

Heirs Of A Fortune After The Estate Tax Was Paid

However, the concern illuminates an issue faced by many at the end of life, who are concerned that the resources they consume to extend their lives may diminish what they can leave for their children.

"These are the kinds of pressures people can feel," said McHugh, although as a staunch opponent of physician-assisted suicide, he said it was not a justification for taking one's life. "This death with dignity idea is made even more ridiculous in that this is death for dollars."

Generational Tension

People respond to the pressure of what they leave to their children differently.

"For some people it's a major concern, for some people it's totally irrelevant," "It depends on the character of the person, and their priority and values."

But would some people's concern for their children cause them to somehow arrange to die during a year with no estate taxes? I don't think that many people would resort to physician-assisted suicide to escape the estate tax.

"You can easily imagine the hypothesis, but there's no evidence supporting the notion that would happen. It's very hard to imagine people doing that for money.

But some say that the lack of an estate tax may give some who are clinging on to life just another reason to check out early. Eileen Fitzpatrick is an attorney and coauthor with her sister Jeanne, who is a physician, of "A Better Way of Dying" A book that deals with decisions to avoid life-saving measures (but not euthanasia) in order to avoid living beyond the time one wants to. She explained that many who die in 2010 of their own accord would likely die from choosing to avoid certain treatments rather than actively attempting suicide.

"People at the end of life reach a point where extending life ceases to be a good thing for that person because the quality of life has so degraded that quality of life has become miserable," Fitzpatrick said.

What's The Big Difference?

One of the many false talking points of the Obama administration is that a rich man like Warren Buffett should not be paying a lower tax rate than his secretary. But anyone whose earnings come from capital gains usually pays a lower tax rate. How are capital gains different from ordinary income? 

Ordinary income is usually guaranteed. If you work a certain amount of time, you are legally entitled to the pay that you were offered when you took the job. Capital gains involve risk. They are not guaranteed. You can invest your money and lose it all.

 

Moreover, the year when you receive capital gains may not be the same as the years when they were earned. Suppose I spend ten years writing a book, making not one cent from it in all that time. Then, in the tenth year, when the book is finished, I may sell it to a publisher who pays me $100,000 in advance royalties.

Am I the same as someone who has a salary of $100,000 that year? Or am I earning $10,000 a year for ten years' work? It so happens that the government will tax me the same as someone who earns $100,000 that year because my decade of work on the book cannot be documented.

But the point here is that it is really a capital gain, and it illustrates the difference between a capital gain and ordinary income. Thus, someone making $100K a year in income for ten years would be considered a rich  millionaire.

Nothing says what this article is about better than this cartoon
 

Then there is the risk factor. There s no guarantee to me that a publisher will actually accept the book that I have worked on for ten years -- and there is no guarantee to the publisher that the public will buy enough copies of the book to repay whatever I might be paid when the contract is signed Even the $10,000 a year -- which is less than anyone can earn on an entry level job -- is not guaranteed If my years of work produced an unpublished manuscript, I would not even have been among the first thousand writers who met this fate.

Very similar principles apply to businesses. We pay attention to businesses after they have succeeded. But most new businesses do not succeed.

Even those businesses that eventually turn out to be enormously successful may go through years of losing money before they have their first year of earning a profit. 

Amazon.com spent years losing money before turning a profit for the first time in 2001. McDonald's teetered on the edge of bankruptcy more than once in its early years.

Desperate expedients were resorted to by the people who ran McDonald's, in order to just keep their noses above the water, while hoping for better days.

At one time, you could have bought half interest in McDonald's for $25,000 -- and there were no takers. Anyone who would have risked $25,000 at that time would be a billionaire today. 

           The Ideas That Currently Run This Nation  

But there was no guarantee at the time that they wouldn't be just throwing 25 grand down a rat hole. Where a capital gain can be documented -- when a builder spends ten years creating a housing development, for example -- then whatever that builder earns in the tenth year is a capital gain, not ordinary income. There is no guarantee in advance that the builder will ever recover his expenses, much less make a profit.

There are whole industries where no one can expect to make a profit the first year -- publishing a newspaper for example. Virtually every major American airline has cost money in some years, and some of the biggest and most famous airlines have ended up going bankrupt. If a country wants investors to invest, it cannot tax their resulting capital gains the same as the incomes of people whose incomes were guaranteed in advance when they took the job.

It is not just a question of "fairness" to investors. Ultimately, it is investors who guarantee other people's incomes in a market economy, even though the investors' own incomes are by no means guaranteed. Reducing investors' incentives to take risks is reducing the jobs their investments are likely to create. Business income is different from employees' income in another way.

The profit that a business makes is first taxed as profit and the remainder is then taxed again as the incomes of people who receive dividends.

The biggest losers from politicians who jack up tax rates are likely to be people who are looking for jobs that will not be there, because investments will not be there to create the jobs.

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How Can a 'Fellow Black American' Oppose Obama?

                      

                                    (This was a comment sent to me)

Mr. Greer,

If you're black and support the
Democrat Party; This Is YOU

      I am shocked that you oppose Barack Obama and belong to the Republican Party. We must get over ourselves and realize there is room at the top for everyone and we must get there by helping each other — instead of agreeing with policies and old politics that are proven not to work.

      To endorse John McCain, a person who will not make it easier for the underprivileged, is just too much. How can a fellow black American feel this way?

Your Former Supporter

Dear Former Supporter,

Democrat Looking For Friends

      Do you have any Republican friends, let alone black ones? If so, how many of them want to make it harder "for the underprivileged"?

      You also might want to familiarize yourself with the history of the Democratic and Republican parties, and see which party has stood up longer for the rights of people of color. Do you know that Democrats opposed the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution — abolishing slavery, granting citizenship rights to newly freed slaves, and guaranteeing the right to vote (at least on paper) to blacks, respectively? Do you know that most of the politicians who stood for segregation were Southern Democrats? Do you know that the Ku Klux Klan was founded by Democrats, one of whose goals was to stop the spread of the Republican Party? Do you know that, as a percentage of the party, more Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

Faithful Democrats Entertain Their Black Members

      Do you know that inner-city parents want vouchers — the right to determine where their children go to school? Do you know most Democrats, including Barack Obama, oppose this? Republicans, for the most part, support vouchers. Where vouchers have been tried, kids appear to perform better, with higher parental satisfaction. You tell me, how many things are more important than a child's education?

      Do you know that 36 percent of babies aborted are black, while blacks make up 13 percent of live births? Do you know that polls show blacks are more pro-life than are whites? Yet the Democratic Party — to which over 95 percent of all registered black voter belong — is the party of Roe v. Wade, requiring states to legalize abortion on demand. Do you know that Margaret Sanger, the founder of the organization that became Planned Parenthood, believed that poor blacks were inferior and that aborting their babies made our society better? Look it up.

      Do you know that blacks stand to benefit more than whites through Social Security privatization, a position opposed by Obama but supported by McCain? Are you even familiar with the issue and what a powerful income-generating vehicle it would be for blacks? If not, take a look at the research done by the libertarian think tank Cato Institute and the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation.

      Porous borders enable illegal aliens to enter our country and threaten the jobs and lower the wages of Americans, many of whom are unskilled people of color.

Illegal Mexican Immigrates Protesting Deportation

      Which party is more determined to deal with this — Republicans or Democrats? Obama called the foes of the House anti-illegal immigration bill "ugly and racist." I did not support the bill, but vehemently object to characterizing those who did as "ugly and racist."

      You speak of policies that have "proven not to work." What about the "war on poverty" that began in the '60s, the policies that Obama and his party want to continue and expand? Do you know that today 70 percent of black children and over 50 percent of Hispanics are born outside of wedlock? The welfare state — which Democrats want to expand — has played a huge role in discouraging marriage and destabilizing families.

      Speaking of helping the "underprivileged," I'd suggest you read a book called "Who Really Cares," by Arthur C. Brooks. A non-Republican professor raised by Democrats, he examined the charitable spending habits of Democrats and Republicans. The results surprised him. Brooks found that Republicans give far more of their money and time for charitable purposes than do Democrats. And the giving is not confined to their churches or other houses of worship. This, by the way, has nothing to do with income. Poor Republicans give more than poor Democrats.

      Compassion is not about making people dependent on government. Compassion is about encouraging personal responsibility, and getting people to understand that life is about making choices. Poverty does not cause crime. Crime causes poverty. Poverty does not cause a child to have a child. A child having a child causes poverty. Finishing high school is a choice. Not joining a gang is a choice. Not having a child until you have the maturity and the means to raise that child is a choice.

      You ask how can a "fellow black American feel this way"? Quite a statement. You may disagree, but it doesn't make me less caring and compassionate than you are. I'm sure you truly consider yourself open-minded and tolerant. But based on your letter, tolerance ends — especially with "fellow black Americans"  if someone has an opposing point of view.

You Need To Leave The Koolaide Alone

No second chances

All I Need Is Another Term; to finish you off ; America

As he campaigns for re-election, Barack Obama pursues a profound and uncommon honor denied to nearly two-thirds of his predecessors. Contrary to a widely held popular belief, political history doesn’t anoint incumbent presidents as automatic winners or even presumptive favorites. The numbers show that most presidents fail in their efforts to maintain a long-term hold on the affections of the fickle public and that Obama will face an uphill struggle in attempting to reprise his epic victory of 2008.

Of the 42 men who served as president before the current incumbent, only 15 won two consecutive elections.

Theodore Roosevelt

Among the others, 5 died during their first terms, 7 incumbents declined to run, 5 tried but failed to win their party’s nomination, and 10 won the nomination but lost their bids for re-election. What’s more, three former presidents (Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore and Theodore Roosevelt) attempted to make comebacks and roared out of retirement as third party candidates; all three of them failed miserably in November, winning between 10 and 27 percent of the popular vote.

The numbers look even worse for second terms if you remove the early “cocked hat” presidents (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe) who easily won re-election before the emergence of the modern two-party system. Washington and Monroe, for instance, both eased into second terms without campaigning and without facing even token opposition. With these early chief executives withdrawn from the equation, 70 percent of those who have served as president since 1825 (26 of 37) failed to win two consecutive terms.

Some of these one-termers counted as obvious failures, rejected by big majorities of their contemporaries and winning scant respect from historians. Even at the time, no one expected John Tyler, James Buchanan or Andrew Johnson to renew their leases on the White House. But other presidents who lost bids for a second term played big roles in history and have earned many admirers throughout the generations. 

If Barack Obama fails in his bid for re-election, he will join such estimable predecessors as John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Grover Cleveland (who came back from his second-term loss to win a non-consecutive victory), William Howard Taft (who returned to Washington as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) and George H W Bush.

Harry Truman

Moreover, two powerful presidents generally labeled “great” or “near great” by historians found themselves nonetheless thwarted in their ambitions to win re-election. Both Harry Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson served as Vice Presidents who succeeded to the presidency upon the death of wildly popular incumbents (Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy), then won a full term in their own right. Widely expected to seek re-election, both men fared poorly in early primaries (Truman actually lost in New Hampshire to the little known Tennessee Senator Estes Keefauver) before withdrawing as candidates—and insisting that they’d intended to withdraw all along.

Of the fifteen presidents who prevailed in winning two consecutive terms (or four, in the case of FDR) nearly all of them count as historical giants and successful, significant chief executives. The only two arguable exceptions would be Ulysses S. Grant (1869-77) and George W. Bush (2001-09), and prominent academics have recently led a major resurgence in Grant’s historical reputation while Bush admirers await a similar re-evaluation for that undeservedly reviled war leader.

In considering the chances for Obama’s re-election, it’s obvious that he doesn’t count as either a sure loser with a thin or non-existent list of accomplishments, nor does he qualify as an obvious winner with a Rushmore-ready profile and a resume of immortal achievements. In other words, President Obama won’t experience the resounding rejection that doomed the re-election hopes of Franklin Pierce, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter, nor will he register the inspiring vote of confidence that gave Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, Ike and Reagan back-to-back victories.

Despite the attempt at apotheosis by the glowing new, Tom Hanks-narrated documentary “The Road We Have Traveled,” Barack Obama can’t run as that sort of triumphant titan; nor need he hide as the feckless, dreary disgrace of conservative propaganda. He clearly occupies some middle ground among first termers, suggesting a fierce, closely contested battle against his all-but-certain opponent, Mitt Romney.

Good Luck GOP

The long, sour, discouraging GOP primary battle has produced soaring Democratic hopes that the public will overcome all doubts and embrace Obama due to fear and loathing of the Republican alternative. But the inevitable course of the re-election struggle will make the race a referendum on whether the public wants another four years like those they’ve just experienced. Clearly, this particular race could go either way, but history shows that whenever once-elected presidents seek a second chance, more often than not the people say no.

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I Don't Have VOTER ID; Can I Still Vote?

Obama administration has “launched an all-out war on voter ID laws” to bolster the president’s re-election chances. 

Ken Blackwell

A Republican activist, Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, asserts that voter ID laws offer a “reasonable safeguard” to protect against voter fraud and ballot-box stuffing.


Blackwell, who was secretary of state in Ohio from 1999 to 2007, also has been mayor of Cincinnati, undersecretary in the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the George H.W. Bush administration, and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. He now is vice chairman of the Republican National Committee's Platform Committee and a senior fellow with the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU). 






The ACRU has launched a new campaign called Protect Your Vote, an effort to protect states’ rights to require voters to present ID cards at the polling place.

The liberal war on voter integrity has now morphed from partisan hypocrisy to parody. It is bad enough for the Obama administration and its cheerleaders in the media to falsely brand the effort by various states to require citizens to present a picture ID when they go to vote as a revival of Jim Crow laws. But the NAACP has reduced that controversy to satire by asking the United Nations Human Rights Council to weigh in on the matter at an upcoming conference on minority rights in Geneva, Switzerland.

This is the same UN Council that is comprised of some of the worst human rights abusers in the world, which includes China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia. The idea that Americans would ask a group whose members are countries that not only restrict voting rights but lack even the façade of democratic rule to take a stand on U.S. laws is beyond absurd. It seems never to have occurred to the partisans at the NAACP that there is something humorous about regimes that deny all of their citizens any say in governance standing in judgment on an actual working democracy. The arguments arrayed against voter ID laws by the Obama administration and those seeking to create a race issue where none exists are already weak. But by involving the UN, the NAACP has exposed itself to some well-earned scorn.


Laws requiring voters to show identification at the polls are common-sense measures to prevent fraud and corruption and to ensure that each year’s election returns accurately reflect the will of the people. With the attack led by the Obama Justice Department on voter ID laws across this country, ACRU has decided to mount a counteroffensive to protect the integrity of ballot boxes all across our country.

Although Attorney General Eric Holder’s actions are purportedly to prevent minorities from being disenfranchised, the reality is that these actions are nothing more than a crass political move with the purpose of ensuring that President Obama gets re-elected. The Justice Department recently blocked a new photo ID law in Texas and halted South Carolina’s law in December. 

Egyptians voter ID card

More than 30 states have tried to put in place a common-sense measure of voter ID so that people are assured that voters are who they purport to be, and voter IDs are commonplace in our culture. After all, you need an ID for a driver’s license, for boarding an airplane, receiving a passport, purchasing alcohol or checking out a library book. So to use it to safeguard the integrity of the voting process at the voting station is  a common-sense measure . 

We've just witnessed voting in Egypt at the end of January. I watched as Egyptians offered voter ID cards to say, I am who I purport to be. This is not a matter of saying there is voter fraud that’s run rampant, but we do have enough anecdotal evidence. We all know the horror stories of ACORN in 2008 and 2010. So there is enough evidence to suggest that we need to put things in place to protect this from going crazy.

The UN Human Rights Council is itself a standing mockery of the entire cause of human rights not just because it is comprised of tyrannies who routinely practice the atrocities the council is supposed to combat, but also because it devotes the vast majority of its time and effort to attacking Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. The UN’s obsession with delegitimizing Israel has long since crossed the line into anti-Semitism. But the world body’s lack of interest in doing something about China’s abuses in Tibet, the plight of women in the Arab world or the suppression of dissent in Cuba and China is just as outrageous.

The internationalization of the voter ID issue is also particularly inane because most developed countries, including the democracies, require citizens to have ID cards as a matter of law.

It should also be remembered that the argument that voter ID laws disenfranchise minorities is a thinly veiled attempt to incite racial distrust at the expense of a good government measure. The notion that there is something discriminatory about requiring voters to properly identify themselves in a nation when such photo IDS are already required for all airline travel and many other routine measures is absurd. The best that Attorney General Holder could do when overruling Texas’ voter ID law last week was to cite the fact that approximately 94 percent of Hispanics have such documentation as opposed to about 96 percent of non-Hispanics. Interestingly, there was no mention in the complaint about any disparity between African-Americans and other citizens even though we are told voter ID laws target the poor.

Justice John Paul Stevens

The Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that voter ID laws were legal. That 6-3-majority opinion was written by liberal Justice John Paul Stevens who wrote, “there is no question about the legitimacy or importance of the State’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters.” Stevens also noted “we cannot conclude that the statute imposes ‘excessively burdensome requirements’ on any class of voters.” That is especially true because the states that have passed or considered voter ID laws have made provisions to give such cards free of charge to the tiny minority of citizens who don’t already have them.

The Obama administration isn't really this stupid, they really know that to get government services and access requires these very same IDs and they understand that these States also have instituted free of cost IDs. This is merely an extension of Critical Race Theory that we have heard so much about lately. Critical Race Theory claims that since racism is embedded with the core structure of society and cannot be expunged through any means racism must be addressed by punitive counter-racism for the benefit of the discriminated parties. So therefore, the administration is pursuing a goal of allowing Blacks and Hispanics to commit voter fraud in an effort to "equalize" the political playing field. The same thinking is behind the DOJ prosecution of "White" perpetrated voter intimidation and their pass when Blacks are accused of the same. This is merely the tip of the iceberg, the most visible. This mindset is filtering down to every level of the Justice bureaucracy and to every sort of crime. Expect to see more excuses for crimes perpetrated by minorities and more prosecutions for vaguely defined "hate" crimes by "Whites.