House Passes Permanent Death Tax Repeal
House Policy Chairman Christopher Cox’s nine-year effort to repeal the Death Tax reached a new milestone of success: today’s House passage of a bill to “sunset the sunset.” Last year Congress repealed the Death Tax, effective January 1, 2010. However, repeal was scheduled to “sunset” due to an arcane Senate rule: the Death Tax would rise from the dead fully re-grown on January 1, 2011.
“A New York Times columnist has called this ‘The Throw Momma from the Train Act,’ because that is the only kind of estate planning it makes possible,” Chairman Cox said. “It’s time to throw the ‘sunset’ from the train.”
Chairman Cox introduced the first major Death Tax repeal legislation in 1993. Before then, no Death Tax repeal bill had been seriously considered in the 20th century.
Co-sponsorships for the Cox legislation grew from 29 in 1994, to 102 cosponsors by 1996, and 204 cosponsors by 1998. On August 5, 1999, and June 9, 2000, the House and Senate both voted for a compromise of the Cox bill, proposed by Reps. Dunn and Tanner, that phases out the Death Tax over 10 years. After being vetoed twice by President Clinton, repeal of the Death Tax was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2001. Now only the permanence of repeal is an issue: unless the anomaly of the “sunset” is fixed, taxpayers face a huge tax increase in 8 years. Today’s vote protects taxpayers from that calamity.
Permanent Death Tax repeal has been endorsed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 60 Plus, the United Seniors Association, the Latino Business Roundtable, the National Black Chamber of Commerce, the Wildlife Society, and the Newspaper Association of America, among other national citizen organizations.
The Congressional Joint Economic Committee has prepared a detailed analysis of the economic growth that Death Tax repeal will stimulate. The paper is titled "The Economics of the Estate Tax," and is available on the Internet at:
http://www.house.gov/jec/tax.htm
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