Let's take a fairly common situation in California. Then, over the years, they pay off their mortgage, raise a family and die at the end of the century. They have never been rich a day in their lives but, when they die, they suddenly become ''rich'' when it comes to paying estate taxes. Their little house may be no more fancy than it ever was, and it is 20 or 30 years older than when they bought it, but it can now be worth half a million dollars or more in the inflated California housing market. Any hope that their children can inherit the house depends on those children coming up with hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay the estate taxes.
Chances are the only way they can get that kind of instant cash is by selling the house.
They may be ''rich'' as liberals define the term, but that just shows how slippery words can be, especially when used by politicians. Ironically, it is California's many liberal restrictions on building which have caused the prices of very modest homes to skyrocket up to levels charged for mansions in other parts of the country. But these big numbers on paper do not translate into any higher standard of living for the people who own these homes. If the home owners sold, then they would have to either pay similarly stratospheric prices to buy another house or pay astronomical rents for an apartment. When they oppose ''tax cuts for the rich,'' liberals often talk about what a small percentage of the people own some large percentage of the total wealth of the population.