Letter to editor

Inheritance tax

a fair tax

To the editor,

In your Feb. 24 issue was a report about the recent appearance in Clyde of gubernatorial candidate John Kasich.

I would like to focus on a part of this story; His use of the term "death tax".

Actually, what we have is an inheritance tax. There is no such thing as a death tax. Dead people don't pay taxes. In fact, dead people don't do much of anything.

The term "death tax" is an emotionally charged term, purposely used by the likes of Mr. Kasich, to garner support for eliminating the inheritance tax. This is a tax that people pay on wealth that they acquire through no effort of their own, but rather simply because of the circumstances of their birth.

We now live in a nation where 20 percent of the people control 80 percent of the wealth. The trend is an ever increasing income disparity between the rich and the poor. This is an inexorably festering cancer in our society. I suspect it is an underlying cause of the unrest of those in the newly evolved Tea Party movement.

The inheritance tax should not be eliminated, as Mr. Kasich and his privileged friends would like. Rather it should be substantially increased. It's called fairness.

Carl G. Sherer

Green Springs