Death Tax

From RationalWiki

Death Tax is an emotive neologism coined during the 2001 US presidential elections meaning Inheritance or Estate Tax. The term was used by the Republican Party to support their repeal of the Estate Tax by creating a false impression of the tax in the mind of the voter. In the US prior to 2001, the Estate Tax almost exclusively applied to the extremely wealthy with assets totalling upwards of two million dollars. Through careful manipulation, the Republican Party managed to convince almost a fifth of the US electorate that the Estate Tax would apply to them, whereas in reality it affected less than 2% of estates.

The phase out of the Estate Tax in the USA has been criticised as creating a permanent aristocracy.

The Conservative Party in the UK picked up on the term during the 2007 party conference. The shadow chancellor George Osbourne used the term when describing the party's proposal to increase the Inheritance Tax threshold from £300,000 to £1,000,000 sterling. During the speech Osbourne seemed rather more reluctant to commit to using the term 'Death Tax' in the same aggressive manner as his counterparts in the US, however this may signal an unwelcome encroachment of emotive attack politics in the UK political arena,