On the recordApril 16, 2015
I thank the gentleman from Nebraska for his leadership on ending this terrible tax. Can you imagine working your whole life to build up a family-owned business or a farm, and then, upon your death, Uncle Sam swoops in and takes nearly half of what you have spent a lifetime building up for your children and grandchildren? Can you imagine this case, as my friend from Washington talked about? This was a farm that had been in his family since the 1880s--five generations. It didn't start that size--it started small--and they built up over years and years and generations and generations. When the young woman went back to Texas--she actually worked up here and went back to Texas to settle her aunt's estate--she and her brother were forced to sell off two-thirds of the farm that they had had for five generations. They had to sell off two-thirds of it just to pay Uncle Sam, just to try to keep some small portion of what their family had worked so hard to build. These are real life examples of how the death tax is the wrong tax at the wrong time, and it hurts the wrong people. It is the number one reason family-owned businesses and farms aren't passed down to the next generations.…
