Chuck Grassley, judging your movie-going habits

The federal estate tax applies to money over $5.49 million dollars that a person leaves behind when they die—$10.98 million for a married couple. Here’s what Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley thinks of all those bums who didn’t bother to leave $5.49 million apiece and therefore won’t benefit from an estate tax repeal:

"I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing,” Grassley (R-Iowa) told the Des Moines Register, “as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”

Yes, if you’d just stopped spending every darn penny your $40,000-a-year job paid on booze and women and movies, you’d have the nearly $6 million that would mean your heirs would benefit from Republicans repealing the estate tax. Why, when you think about it that way, it’s not about massive generational wealth at all!

In reality, of course, the estate tax isn’t about some people who can’t lay off the booze and movies, it is about massive generational wealth transfers, with only two out of 1,000 estates paying any federal estate tax at all. Because it turns out that even if you drink no booze and watch no movies and invest pretty damn carefully, you can’t save $5.49 million in a lifetime of work if you’re making the average American salary. Or twice the average American salary, for that matter. To have estate tax-level money, you either have to have inherited a lot yourself, been paid an amount that only a couple percent of Americans are paid, or gotten really, really lucky in an investment. Lottery jackpot lucky. Early Apple investor lucky.

But what Republican politicians think of you if you don’t have $5.49 million to leave your heirs is apparently that you spent every day at the movies with a bottle of booze and an expensive woman.