The debate over eliminating the Estate Tax has been simmering in the Senate for weeks and Republicans are starting to believe that Dem opposition to a complete repeal of the tax will ultimately derail the bill.<\/p>\n
But they’re going to schedule a vote anyway<\/a>, because they want to use the effort in campaign ads next year.<\/p>\n Unless Democrats agree to a deal, Republicans are vowing to use the estate-tax vote as political ammunition in the 2006 cycle. […] Frist favors full repeal of the tax “above all other options,” said Amy Call, his spokeswoman. She added, “[Frist] hopes 59 of our colleagues join us.”<\/p>\n His position seems to be in line with conservative activists who think they could gain political advantage by forcing a simple up-or-down vote on repeal upon centrist Democrats, especially in red states.<\/p>\n “It’s time to put up or shut up. Who is for abolition, and who is not? We’ll have a target list” of who supports and opposes repeal, said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I know I’m a hopeless idealist, and I should appreciate the fact that GOP attack ads don’t have to make sense, but if anyone should be using the Estate Tax vote in the 2006 cycle, shouldn’t it be the Dems?<\/p>\n Consider the landscape we’re dealing with here. The deficit for the year is going to be a third of a trillion dollars. The wars in the Middle East are costing us billions of dollars a week. Benefits for low-income families are already being cut<\/a>. The Republicans consider these circumstances and believe that multi-millionaires deserve another exclusive tax cut that will benefit only the super-rich. And if you disagree, you shouldn’t even be in Congress.<\/p>\n We’re talking about a tax cut that could cost the government more than $1 trillion<\/a> over the first ten years after the full repeal goes into effect. It’s so irresponsible that even Alan Greenspan, who hasn’t hesitated to embrace previous GOP tax cuts, told Congress this is a mistake<\/a>.<\/p>\n Best of all, charitable giving, which Bush is pretending to care about<\/a>, would be seriously undercut if the repeal becomes law. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has “found that the estate tax encourages wealthy individuals to donate<\/a> considerably more to charity, since estate tax liability is reduced through donations made both during life and at death.” If there were no estate tax in 2000, for example, “charitable donations would have been between $13 billion to $25 billion lower than they actually were.”<\/p>\n Republicans, despite all of this, are anxious for an Estate Tax showdown — and nearly every GOP senator in the chamber will vote for a full repeal. If facts still have any place in the political discourse, I don’t think there’s any reason for Dems to be afraid of this fight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The debate over eliminating the Estate Tax has been simmering in the Senate for weeks and Republicans are starting to believe that Dem opposition to a complete repeal of the tax will ultimately derail the bill. But they’re going to schedule a vote anyway, because they want to use the effort in campaign ads next […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4810\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}