Russ Feingold: “it is no secret that the benefits of this bill are not fairly distributed. The highest-income one percent receive 35…”

“it is no secret that the benefits of this bill are not fairly distributed. The highest-income one percent receive 35 percent of this bill's benefits. A significant contributor to this imbalance is the estate tax provisions of the bill. Even under current law, roughly 98 percent of Americans will never have to pay a cent of estate tax. So this bill's $145 billion in estate tax cuts will benefit only the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans, and will have no benefit for the other 98 percent of us. But even in the estate tax provisions themselves, this bill tilts unnecessarily to the very wealthiest. The bill would increase the unified credit exemption up to $4 million a person, or $8 million a couple. This change alone will exempt all but the very wealthiest Americans from any contact with the estate tax. But the bill goes further. It would also reduce the rate of taxation that the few extremely wealthy families who still have to pay the estate tax would pay. It thus focuses tax cuts on the very pinnacle of wealth. Let me give you an idea of the numbers. According to an analysis done by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, fewer than 50,000 families in the entire United States paid any estate tax at all in 1999. But of those families, fewer than 3,300 families had estates larger than $5 million in size. These small numbers are indicative of the very few who would benefit from the rate reductions in this bill.”