Estate tax survives
despite Bill Nelson's efforts
Today a key procedural vote provided a huge victory for those who oppose estate tax repeal. The vote on a motion to proceed with consideration of estate tax repeal, which required 60 Senators to agree, failed 57-41.
Florida’s Bill Nelson was one of the renegade Democrats who voted for the motion to proceed. He is a longtime proponent of abolishing the tax.
The vote today affirms that the Senate will not pass full repeal of the estate tax. However, those seeking to make changes to the estate tax are expected to continue to work on proposals short of full repeal that could be brought up later this year. So the debate will continue ...
See previous post about the estate tax here.
Some background you should know: Eighteen families – including the owners of Wal-Mart – that stand to save $71.6 billion in taxes are financing lobbying efforts to repeal the estate tax. Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy said the families perpetrated a fraud on ordinary Americans by saying the levy constitutes an unfair "death tax." Only about 0.25 percent of Americans who die this year will leave an estate large enough to be taxed, the groups said.
Read the Seattle Post-Intelligencer report here. (Thanks to What's Wrong with Orlando Politics for the link.)
In Florida, fewer than 2% of the people who died in 2003 were subject to the estate tax. Check out the report from Citizens for Tax Justice analysis, broken down by state, of IRS data here.
Update: Check out Social Justice's post here.
posted by Jacqueline Dowd @ 3:23 PM
3 Comments:
You may already have heard about Democratic candidate Alex Sink for CFO and her efforts to create a grassroots campaign online, but if not – that’s exactly what they’re trying to do. And I’m looking for Florida bloggers to contribute content to some of her online communities at Gather.com.
Her supporters have created a number of different groups on Gather ranging from Lawyers for Alex to Republicans for Alex and they’ve begun to create some interesting discussion. However, in order to really engage Floridians in this under-the-radar, but bizarrely important (it’s the second most powerful position in the state) election we need bloggers to attract people to these groups by posting interesting content and spreading the word throughout the blogosphere.
We're looking for bloggers and blog readers to post their content in these groups so we can give people a reason to visit them (nobody wants to read a stale press release). You don’t need to endorse her or talk about how wonderful she is (you can if you want though) you only need to post entries pertinent to Floridians . You can also link back to your own blog, and eventually we’ll have RSS and this will be much easier.
We have a small window of opportunity with Alex’s campaign to prove that the internet and online communities can serve as powerful tools in engaging voters, raising money and getting people to vote but we desperately need the help of bloggers like yourself to prove this point to Democrats and Republicans alike. If you’re interested in being part of this effort please email bankersforalex@gmail.com
I ended up getting into a spirited arguement with someone collecting signatures to abolish the estate tax the other day. The only way to sell a bill like that to people is to obsfucate the fact that the estate tax only applies to the very wealthy. Also, nicknaming it the "death tax" also makes people more inclined to get rid of it.
"I'll be taxed for dying? Dang."
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