Oooh, I love a battle of obsessions. You really ought to see my Barbie collection. Well it's not mine really, Paul Constant asks me to keep an eye on his dolls while he's at work. I've been told the collection is Pulitzer worthy.

Frank Blethen is obsessed with dodging taxes. He has done an outstanding job throughout his life, and he is afraid that he might someday die and that his idiot children will not be as obsessed with dodging their fair share as he is. Like most wealthy Republicans, he hates his children.

Your last two lines are the best thing you've written in months Goldy!

If you can't tax them when they're alive, you need to tax them when they're dead.

Well, it's unfortunate Mr Blethen won't have much left to tax because the IMF just changed its mind and decided that taxing the rich and their assets was our one chance to fix the deficit: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/11/in…

Oh snap!

Gerd Dern Liburals taxing my death. I earned that money fair and square. I won it. I pissed on it. Ur gone tax it? From my cold dead hands!

I can only assume this kind of comment would be Seattle Time's main demographic at this point.

The real crime is that we don't tax bequests from estates the same as we do gifts when one is alive. Why should money get to move tax free simply because somebody has died?

I can go both ways on this.

To some extent, as we make people independently wealthy - which should be, but often is not the goal of the GOP -- they can be freed of the welfare state or the need to do business and to operate as the kind of free men that the Constitution was written for.

Of course, what we ended up with is an out of control system with no feedback loops that let 400 guys take it all and leave everyone else as some form of serf.

So, this is why I always go with asset or property taxes above a certain, reasonable but high, limit.

At the point someone has earned enough to tide them over comfortably for his life then that's it. Game over. You're retired, good bye! Money is not to be hoarded and held over people's heads. It's there to free you to be that Jefferson or Washington, or, if you like nice things, Hamilton. But not Croesus!

Here's what I don't get: conservatives love to celebrate those scrappy, bootstrapping, entrepreneurial types who boldly make their way in the world, building an empire from nothing, right?

And they hate people who are lazy welfare bums who just sit back and take advantage of other people's labor, right?

So why the heck wouldn't they be all in favor of a 100% estate tax? After all, what's the difference between being a trust fund baby and a welfare fraud? Except the trust fund baby is even more of a parasite, of course.

Right wingers always say that the more you tax something the less you get of it. So let's take them at their word: let's stop taxing labor and wages and start taxing death.