Lincoln’s $250 billion estate tax plan would cut taxes for only 60 ’small businesses.’
Last week, 10 Democrats in the Senate joined all 41 Republicans in voting for a $250 billion proposal to cut estate taxes, designed by Sens. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ). More than 99 percent of this cost would go to the inheritors of estates worth over $7 million. Touting the tax cut in a press release, Lincoln claimed that it was “aimed at farms and small businesses.” However, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, Lincoln’s $250 billion proposal would save just 60 small businesses or farms from the estate tax:
An always charged issue is how the estate tax affects small farms and family-owned businesses. We estimate that under the Obama proposal, 100 family farms and businesses would owe tax…The Lincoln-Kyl proposal would cut the number to 40.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, “almost all such estates are able to pay the tax bill without having to sell business assets.”
Another example of tax-cutting to hurt our long term deficit...
For those of us concerned about the Ocean of Debt these kinds of tax-cuts are not good policy.
As CBPP noted regarding this "say one thing do another" ideological attack from some folks:
Many of the same Senators and House members who launched the sharpest verbal attacks this week on the President’s budget or the congressional budget plans — on the ground that the deficits and debt projected under those plans are much too high — then opposed a number of the tough choices the President’s budget makes to start reducing deficits. Those tough choices include allowing many of the generous tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 to expire for people at the top of the income scale, making the 2009 estates tax rules permanent rather than eliminating still more of that tax, and limiting itemized deductions for families making over $250,000 to help finance health care reform that is intended to reduce costs over the long term.
