Our Gold Star wives lose, again. The Widow’s Tax was not eliminated again this year. The Widow’s Tax seems to get a lot of lip service from politicians of every walk and political persuasion. It all boils down to funding priorities. No one in this country has paid a higher price for our continued freedom in this wonderful Country.
Unfortunately for them that sacrifice is not enough for the “greedy hand” of our tax hungry government.
I don’t want to link or quote the most recent article that covers it in depth since it’s an AP source. Here is a link, however, to a search on “Military Widow’s Tax” that will lead you to a lot of recent information.
Here’s an excerpt I found that is a non-AP source and it is well written. It also explains what the tax is about for those who are unfamiliar with the history of this travesty. From Newsvine:
As written in the Washington post: “The widows’ tax is a law that won’t allow surviving spouses to receive the retirement pay due them when their spouse died from a cause related to military service, and at the same time collect the full annuity – essentially an insurance policy most of their spouses opted to buy. They paid an average of 6.5 percent of their retirement pay in premiums, often $100 or more a month.
Because one benefit is subtracted from the other, affected surviving spouses lose about $1,000 a month on average. There are about 54,000 survivors who are affected by the policy, whose spouses served in conflicts from World War II to Afghanistan, and that number could grow. READ ENTIRE ARTICLE
The author quotes $100 a month, but I have read it can be as high as $1000 a month depending on the worth of the annuity. So the military promotes this benefit, and takes money from the soldier’s pay for the added coverage “just in case.” That benefit is paid for so that a soldier can provide for his/her family in the case of death, right? Then the Government takes the benefit away in the name of ‘taxes.’
If “pure and undefiled religion” in the eyes of God is “visiting the widows and orphans in their distress,” then taxing their income to this degree is an outright blasphemous sin.
