UK's Prime Minister recently made comments to his Conservative Party's colleagues regarding the deserving poor as justification to cut back welfare payments. Meanwhile his party supports lower inheritance taxes and private education that function in direct contradiction to any fairness principle. The author of this piece justifiably looks into how fairness might apply to the undeserving rich.
Here in the US, the rich are fighting back against any notions of ending their tax breaks given to them by Bush, Jr. And did you know that there isn't any federal inheritance tax in the US at the present time? Jamie Johnson from Vanity Fair explains:
There’s also the issue of the phenomenal, but temporary, quirk that exists in the world of the estate tax. Bizarrely, in what remains a surprise to virtually everyone familiar with the topic, a full estate-tax repeal has existed for the entire calendar year 2010. Thanks to a lapsed law, no estate, not even those worth many billions of dollars, has been taxed this year. The aberration is so odd that wealthy people aren’t really able to consider how to plan for it. They just morbidly joke among themselves that it’s a terrific year to die.Well, I'm sure that it was just a Congressional oversight--those folks are so busy.