Bill Archer: “Mr. Speaker, today is another historic and proud moment for this House, for our country, and for me personally. When I…”

“Mr. Speaker, today is another historic and proud moment for this House, for our country, and for me personally. When I came to Congress 30 years ago, I had three major goals. One was to balance the budget so that future generations would not have to pay the high debt service charges. The second was to eliminate the earnings limit on Social Security beneficiaries so that they continue to work without suffering the loss of their Social Security benefits. Both of those two are now the law of the land. My third goal was to abolish the death tax. And today we will do that on a bipartisan basis. We will completely repeal it. We will erase it from the Tax Code forever, in hopes that it will never return from the dead to haunt American families, farms, businesses. This is truly an historic day. The death tax is wrong. Death as an event should not trigger a tax. Some have even said that it is ghoulish to think that someone who works an entire lifetime saving, preparing to leave something to their children, starting a business, running a ranch or a farm, and all the time paying taxes to find that what is left over gets hit again from the grave.”