Who shall live, and who shall die?

It all depends on the death tax:

In a 2001 paper entitled "Dying to Save Taxes," economists from the University of Michigan and the University of British Columbia examined 13 changes in U.S. tax law since 1917 and concluded that benefactors die in greater numbers just before tax hikes and just after tax cuts. A 2006 study done in Australia, which abolished its inheritance tax in July 1979, reached the same conclusion. Statistics showed that more than half the people who would ordinarily have died in the last week of June 1979—and whose heirs would have been subject to the tax—managed to avoid it by surviving into July.

Excuse me, but how did they know which people would have "ordinarily died" in June and which were scheduled to expire in July? Did God drop by with an enormous clipboard containing a list of those who were supposed to kick the bucket in June? And wasn't the Almighty almighty annoyed that these upstarts had not adhered to His schedule?

People are supposed to die when they are scheduled to die and not hang around making damn nuisances of themselves for inheritance purposes!

I blame Bush.

Quote lifted from Best of the Web.