Thursday, June 01, 2006

Estate Tax by the numbers

This is one of my pet subjects, the Estate Tax, or as spun by the Republics and their "base", the "Death Tax."

I read a couple of items lately. One from a column in the San Francisco Chronicle cited a Brookings Institute study which said that the Estate Tax as currently written would affect only a bit over 12,000 families and already-scheduled increases in the exemption would affect only a bit over 7,000 families.

And the cost of reducing or eliminating the Estate Tax will cost 1 trillion dollars over 10 years.

12,000 families vs 1 trillion dollars. Hmmm.

Under a more modest reform proposed by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, 99.7% of all estates would pay no estate tax at all. And only 50 small businesses and farms would owe any estate tax.