Joe Cunningham: “I have a family in San Diego. They are not in my district. I called him a Hispanic American and he corrected me and…”

“I have a family in San Diego. They are not in my district. I called him a Hispanic American and he corrected me and said, ``I'm a Mexican American, Congressman.'' That gentleman has since passed away. When he immigrated to California over 60 years ago, his family bought a piece of dirt down along the border. It is rock. You still look at it today and it looks like rock and dirt and you cannot grow anything on it and it was basically worthless. But that family worked and saved to buy that piece of land. Like most urban sprawl areas, that land became very valuable. The gentleman died. They had six children. When the tax bill on that property came up, because he did not have money to hire lawyers and to set their estate and probate and all the different things that you can do today, they tried to split the land and sell half of it just because of the interest on the default for the tax, and it did not even cover the penalty. Then they had to sell the rest of it. So those six children ended up with nothing. This is a low-income Hispanic family that had some valuable property that they wanted to hang on to for the family, and the estate tax did away with it. I am from California, but I grew up in a little town in Shelbina, Missouri. Right there, farmers are having second and third jobs just to hang on to their property. The property, the farm, if they sold it, is probably worth a lot of money, but they sure do not make a lot of money.”