Kent Conrad: “I would say to my colleagues and the Senator from Arizona, it strikes me as ill-timed to come before the body and ask…”

“I would say to my colleagues and the Senator from Arizona, it strikes me as ill-timed to come before the body and ask for another $46 billion when we are already deep in debt. We now know we are going to be facing deficits this year of $500 billion; the deficits as defined by law of over $300 billion every year for the next 10 years. We are going to be taking virtually every penny of the Social Security surplus under the chairman's mark. Now the Senator offers $46 billion, which he funds by reducing function 920. Function 920, of course, is a general governmental function, which is a popular place to reduce around here. I say to my colleagues, it seems to me that a wiser course than full repeal, which costs, combined with this amendment, $207 billion over the period of this budget, when we are already running deficits under the chairman's mark of $1.7 trillion, that a wiser course would be, instead of waiting until 2009 to have an elimination of the estate tax, to have people waiting all of that time between now and then and having an exemption of $1 million currently, instead of that, we could go to a $3 million exemption per person, $6 million per couple, have it take effect now, and only cost $33 billion for the whole thing, a fraction of the cost of complete repeal. We would continue to have a functioning estate tax but fundamentally reform it: Change it, don't end it.”