Goodwin Plan for Solving Nursing Home Crisis: Eat the Rich!

[TexasTowelie]

While I’m digging through Rep. Goodwin’s (R) ramblings, I am pleased to find that, in a way, Rep. Goodwin seems to support something like the estate tax.

Goodwin’s outburst of class envy comes in his April 8 discussion of his and the Legislature’s failure to fix the nursing home crisis:

…if the nursing home is a private business or run by a nonprofit, why are the tax payers on the hook in the first place? Also, how many residents through skillful maneuvering of their assets gave the estate to their heirs and now on paper have nothing? Now they fall into the Medicaid reimbursement category. The estate they willed to their heirs could be a multi-million dollar estate. However, the nursing home residents are now on the state’s dole.(?) My thoughts are that if someone is truly down and out and doesn’t have any assets or have used these assets up, then they should be eligible for state Medicaid programs. But for multi-millionaires to be on Medicaid?…it just feels wrong to me [Rep. Tim Goodwin (R-30/Rapid City), “The legislation session is over: we still have a lot of work to do!!” legislator blog, 2019.04.08].

Read that again: conservative Representative Tim Goodwin is saying that it’s not fair that multi-millionaires should be able to pass all of their wealth to their kids. Goodwin is saying that multimillionaires should burn that money up before they die.

I can only wish Rep. Goodwin could see one logical conclusion of his class envy here: if we maintained a robust estate tax, we could prevent exactly that kind of unfair wealth consolidation. We would capture wealth that could be put into Medicaid that would solve the nursing home crisis.

Read more: http://dakotafreepress.com/2019/04/17/goodwin-plan-for-solving-nursing-home-crisis-eat-the-rich/

[shanny]

1. Isn't it Goodwin's entire point

that millionaires are avoiding the estate tax, robust or otherwise?