David Weldon: “Colleagues, let us remember what this debate is really all about. There are a lot of people who want to reopen the whole…”

“Colleagues, let us remember what this debate is really all about. There are a lot of people who want to reopen the whole issue of the inheritance tax, but we already passed a phaseout of the inheritance tax in this body last year. I think it was fairly overwhelming, the vote, and I think a lot of Democrats voted for phasing out the inheritance tax. Because of a quirk in the rules in the other body, the inheritance tax is phased out and then in 2011 it comes back. The reality is that for many people, small business owners in particular, and they are the group this tax most adversely affects, when they try to pass their small business to their heirs, 67 percent of them fail. And one of the biggest reasons they fail is because they get hit by this inheritance tax. They frequently have to lay off employees. And those people right now do not know what to do because the inheritance tax comes back in 2011. Many of them are maintaining elaborate estate plans specifically because of the feature in our bill. This really does affect jobs. Most of the job growth in my district over the last 7 rac{1}{2} years has been from small businesses. And the only way to deal with this is to get rid of that sunset provision. That is why I introduced this bill. An economic analysis has been done on this, and getting rid of this feature can add up to $150 billion to our economy over the next 10 years. It can affect 200,000 jobs.”