clear distinctions (rambling) (Score 1)

First - this is an excellent description of the current race.

If you're passing on an inheritance worth more than $1 million, you've probably figured out your will, your tax shelters, life insurance, and the effect on your family years, if not decades, before your demise.

You can't shape the law for people who won't plan, and if you don't have the resources to pay tax attorneys and accountants, the inheritance tax isn't going to affect you.

Yes, an inheritance tax conflicts with the idea of a free market, but we don't have a free market. We haven't yet had a free market, with no tarrifs, no trade laws, etc, since Europeans turned this land mass into colonies.

And we can't have a truly free, unfettered market. Truly free, market economies allow for boom and bust cycles that dwarf the great depression and our [gradually diminishing] tech/money love affair.

Look at Russia, the most unregulated economy in the world. Unemployment is twice as high as the worst unemployment in the US during the Depression, corruption is at unbelievable levels and the people are so desperate that they welcome authoritarian leadership. All this despite having the richest array of natural resources, traditionally a cornerstone of economic power, of any nation on earth.

The "new" economy that so many of us are enjoying depends on productivity and ingenuity in the private sector, but it also requires that government provide the right kind of regulation and oversight. Too much regulation and innovation is stifled, too little and the incentives for innnovation and competition dissapear.

The Clinton/Gore administration has found the right balance in providing an environment for the economy to flourish. If people don't take advantage of that environment, then it doesn't really matter. In the past eight years, this combination has created huge amounts of wealth. Great, let's keep it going by carefully handling the market forces. The same conservative economists who promoted shock-therapy for Russia (the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and other conservative think tanks) are backing this giant tax cut.

Don't forget the publicly funded research (even private research is publicly funded through tax credits) that started this technology machine and help keep it running (don't listen to me - ask Vint Cerf).

Yes, we each make our own destiny, but government sets the stage.

The biggest problem I have with GWB is that he doesn't seem to understand the complex effects of government actions. That and his choice of Dick Cheney, who headed the VP selection committee and then selected himself. What a pillar of ethics he is. Sure, he sounds like a nice, grandfather-type, not a power-hungry opportunist.

What was the question?