That's a principled stand: 'I want to do something, but I do not have legitimate authority to make sit so.' It's actually amazingly principled for someone in Washington.
Many like him (I don't know him in particular) want to appear to appeal to our principles in order to manipulate us into support or at least quiescence, so they use the words that accomplish that. Meanwhile they are enacting policies (and ideologies) they desire, including enriching big business and other wealthy constituents of his party. It's like watching a magician - don't watch where they're directing your attention, look at the other hand. Or, 'follow the money' - who benefits?
These messages are carefully crafted - literally; experts are hired to compose them, messaging is tested like marketing, and people are trained in what to say (talking points). For example, you may recall that in the debate about cutting estate taxes the GOP started calling them "death taxes" and taking about the cost to small farmers and businesses; all that messaging was composed, using the process I described, by a guy they hired in the 1990s - and sure enough, 10 years later people I know were repeating it like it was gospel.
That describes all money everywhere, to a great degree. Think of it this way: The money you have, unless you printed it, came from someone else. And unless that someone else printed it, the 'same' money came from somebody before them. Unless you print it, all money comes from someone and circulates endlessly.
A lot of macroeconomics is based around this circulation of money. Think of this: When I buy dinner at your restaurant, I'm out $25 from my microeconomic perspective. But from the _macro_economic perspective, from the perspective of the national economy, no money is lost at all - it merely shifts from my pocket to yours. (This ignores some other significant issues, of course.)
Almost all taxation occurs when the money changes hands. I don't see why massive estate transactions should be exempted.
> death taxes suck
Well all taxes suck, but so does my electricity bill and everything else I pay for. I have no problem paying my share of the national bills; I'd be ashamed to try to shift my share onto others.
Currently, yes. There's no reason why we couldn't have wealth taxes or land-value taxes rather than transaction taxes, of course.
It's also offensive that the estate tax is punitive: I believe that current tax is 40% on everything over a certain amount. That is, IMHO, insane: the State is declaring that it has a 40% stake in all of someone's financial success, despite having taxed every penny of that when it was earned in the first place.
Finally, you're missing the point: we tax money at transactions because it's at those transactions that value is created: I pay you $25 for dinner, and I get $25+x value from that meal, while you pay $25-y to create it, leaving the economy $x+y better. I think it's reasonable to attempt to capture some of the value of those transactions to fund the government whose security & stability make them possible (e.g. your restaurant need not hire guards, because we have police; I need not pay for a road from my house to your restaurant, because one has been provided, &c.). But there's no value created at death: it's just a transfer, and to tax it (particularly at punitive rates) just seems like grasping greed.
> I have no problem paying my share of the national bills; I'd be ashamed to try to shift my share onto others.
I really hate this tone from supporters of high taxation, for two reasons: first, at least this proponent of changing our tax system doesn't object to paying his share; second, I believe many tax supporters want to raise taxes on somebody else.
The exact definition of what's a good trade-off between services afforded and who to tax how much differs from one person to another, and one government to another. The common undercurrent, though, is that there is stuff to pay for, and that the decision lies with the people (via elected representatives) and not some arbitrary set of principles such as "because value is created".
We adopt laws based on such principles because they seem like a good enough solution that many can agree on. Many can also agree that taking money from someone who's dead is doing less harm than taking more money from someone who's still alive or cutting services (which also amounts to taking from people who are still alive). Many also agree that the deceased should have some say, pre-mortem, in how their legacy gets allocated.
That's why you have the right to bestow money upon your chosen heirs at all, rather than it all going to the state, or the king, or the first rando who happens to loot your home. Not because we follow unchangable principles, but because enough of us agree that it's the right thing to do. It's a subtle distinction.
A constitution is the lowest common denominator that a large enough majority of people can agree on. The US Constitution does not go into detail about what to tax and why. If there is a subsequent decision by the Supreme Court that acts as authoritative source for your argument, I'm happy to see it. Otherwise, your interpretation is just that, an opinion that people may agree with or disagree.
If, collectively, the people decide that the dead person's untaxed non-charitable donation rights are more important than the living's tax rates and/or services, I'm sure we can find a way to reduce or eliminate estate taxes.
However, I believe his reason for not doing anything about it has less to do with his principles about the free market and more to do with being in bed with the big media companies who would love nothing more than to remove any free alternative to paid streaming media services. Pai has had no qualms wielding executive power in gutting net neutrality to pave the road for tiered Internet schemes and zero-rating. He does it under the guise of being some sort of free market evangelist, but it's really all about the money he gets from lobbyists[1].
He's going to retire from government work a filthy rich man, and he's doing so by eroding consumer digital freedoms.
[1] http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2016...
He's not "using executive power" to gut anything. He's choosing not to exercise the executive's authority to actively enforce rules that would be necessary ensure net neutrality.
You and I may not like it, but it's not ideologically inconsistent like you make it out to be.
> "I’m optimistic that last month’s election will prove to be an inflection point—and that during the Trump Administration, we will shift from playing defense at the FCC to going on offense," Pai said in a speech yesterday before the Free State Foundation in Washington, DC, said. The commission "need[s] to remove outdated and unnecessary regulations... We need to fire up the weed whacker and remove those rules that are holding back investment, innovation, and job creation," he also said.[1]
He is planning to remove net neutrality regulation, not just decline to enforce it.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/12/fccs-...
When you're talking about the executive branch, "removing regulation" means issuing guidelines (and executing them). They have the authority to do this one way or the other, and he is choosing to issue rules that involve a smaller display of executive authority when enforced.
Except in a very abstract linguistic sense, it makes no sense to say that "removing regulations" is a more "active" use of authority than actually actively enforcing regulations.
This isn't really any different from a police sergeant disagreeing publicly with something but saying he still going to enforce the existing laws around it or he doesn't think would be legal to make a law to cover it. For example, flag burning. Lots of people think it should be illegal, lots of people know that that would be unconstitutional.