Leadership Quote by Mike Fitzpatrick

“Dying should not be a taxable event” is politics at its most morally loaded: a clean, almost throwaway sentence that smuggles an argument about the proper limits of the state. Fitzpatrick frames death not as a legal transaction but as a human boundary line, implying that crossing it shouldn’t trigger a government invoice. The wording matters. “Taxable event” is cold, technical jargon from accountants and IRS forms, and that chill is the point: it makes the idea of estate taxation feel faintly grotesque, like bureaucrats hovering at the bedside with a clipboard.

The specific intent is to delegitimize the estate tax by recoding it as a tax on mortality rather than on accumulated wealth. Critics of inheritance taxes often lose when the debate is about inequality and dynastic fortunes; Fitzpatrick sidesteps that terrain by moving the fight into a register of dignity and grief. It’s a rhetorical jujitsu move: if you accept the premise that death is being “taxed,” you’re already halfway to outrage.

Subtext: the government is portrayed as opportunistic, arriving at the most vulnerable moment to take a cut. It also quietly centers the perspective of property owners and heirs, not the public services funded by taxes or the structural advantages that large inheritances preserve. In context, this line fits an American tradition of anti-tax language that treats taxation less as civic membership and more as intrusion. The sentence works because it’s memorable, clinical, and accusatory - a slogan with a moral pulse.