Jon Kyl: “let me take a few moments to discuss what this motion to instruct conferees embodies. The subject is the death tax, the…”

“let me take a few moments to discuss what this motion to instruct conferees embodies. The subject is the death tax, the tax which requires millions of American families and small businesses to spend millions of dollars preparing against the possibility that they will have to pay very large amounts of money to the Federal Government upon the death of the person in the family who is responsible for that small business or who owns the property. For a long time, there has been a bipartisan understanding that this death tax is not a good thing. The Gallup poll and other polls consistently show that at least 60 percent of the American people think it is an unfair tax, that we should not be taking money from people at the time of death. They have already paid income taxes on it, frequently capital gains and dividends taxes, and yet again they are taxed at the time of death on an amount of asset that remains. But just as pernicious as that tax is the planning, and the expensive planning, that has to go into trying to prepare for the possibility that the tax will be imposed--if you have a very large estate, frankly, trying to avoid having to pay a large amount of taxes into that estate because that frequently means you have to sell the small business, the farm, in order to liquidate assets to pay the tax. This is not a theoretical proposition.…”