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Money Management for Senior Citizens
Estate Tax Repeal Fails Again; GOP Scrambles for
Other Options
By
ElderLawAnswers.com
 July 25, 2006 - With no publicity or fanfare, on
the night of July 20 Senate Republicans made another failed attempt to
bring total repeal of the estate tax to a vote. The vote was 57-41,
short of the 60 votes needed to break a Democratic filibuster.
There are still reports that the GOP Senate
leadership is attempting to insert a significant rollback of the estate
tax into a bill overhauling pension laws, which is now in conference
committee.
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The effort is meeting strong resistance from fellow
Republicans negotiating the pension bill, such as Senate Finance
Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA). "We're getting some pressure from
leadership to maybe put it in," Grassley said. "I think it is a gamble
to put it in and I'm going to advise against it."
Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), who is also negotiating the
pension bill, took an even dimmer view. "Estate tax is out," Baucus
said. "It's not going to be in. It's not even being discussed."
Republicans aren't the only ones seeking to tie a
measure cutting the estate tax to other legislation. Some Democrats want
to try the novel approach of linking a tax break for the richest
Americans with an increase in the wage for the poorest. Officials of the
Association for Advanced Life Underwriting say they are hearing talk
of efforts to combine a provision increasing the minimum wage with S.
3626, which was introduced by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) in June. S. 3626
would establish an estate tax exemption of $5 million per individual or
$10 million per couple, along with a top estate tax rate of 35 percent.
But what the Republican administration hasn't yet
been able to achieve legislatively it may be able to realize in other
ways. According to the June 23, 2006,
New York Times, the federal government is eliminating the jobs of
nearly half of the lawyers at the Internal Revenue Service who audit tax
returns of some of the wealthiest Americans, specifically those who are
subject to gift and estate taxes. Sharyn Phillips, a veteran I.R.S.
estate tax lawyer, called the cuts a back-door way for the Bush
administration to achieve what it cannot get from Congress, which is
repeal of the estate tax.
President Bush used the first address to the NAACP
of his presidency to promote estate tax repeal. Bush maintained that
"the death tax will prevent future African-American entrepreneurs from
being able to pass their assets from one generation to the next."
According to the
Center for American Progress, of the 38 million African-Americans in
the United States, just 59 will pay the estate tax this year, and that
number will drop to 33 in 2009.
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