An association of farms and businesses is applauding Congresswoman Candy Miller for co-sponsoring a bill to permanently repeal the estate tax, aka the “death tax.”
 In a news release the American Family Business Institute said that Miller is a “champion” for standing with nearly 100 other co-sponsors of a bill that would save 10,000 small business owners and farmers from the dreaded death tax this year.
Isn’t this getting a little old?
This is basically the same argument that was used all the way back to the Clinton administration when the exemption from the death tax stood at $1.5 million. In 2000, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the tax affected less than 2,000 farm or business owners. And, obviously, those were very high-income people.
During the Bush years when the exemption was bumped up to $3.5 million, similar arguments were made by farm-state lawmakers and a host of Republicans. At that time, the Tax Policy Center in Washington estimated that less than 100 farms and small businesses per year were impacted by this so-called “onerous and confiscatory tax.”
Now that the exemption is all the way up to $5 million — meaning no taxes are paid on the first $5 million in assets inherited — the realities have changed but the nonsense spouted by farm groups and their allies on Capitol Hill has not.

In other words, the image of a distraught farmer hauling away the last of his belongings on the back of a tractor after losing his family’s property is just that — an image. A sales pitch. A myth.

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