How much is $8 billion? Well, look at it this way - the budget for the Army Corps of Engineers for this year is $5.1 billion. The budget for the Social Security Administration is $9.7 billion. And the budget for the EPA is $10.5 billion. At a loss of about $2 billion per month, not having an estate tax could run as much as $24 billion for the entire year. And that's a lot of tax money to waste.
Not that I like taxes, but when a tax is fairly easy to collect and has been in place for 70 years, it's lazy and unimaginative to not try to collect it. Not to mention the fact that the federal budget is nowhere close to being balanced.
For those who haven't been following the estate tax dilemma, here's a recap: This is the tenth year of a 10-year bill that steadily increased the exemption from the estate tax to $3.5 million during the ninth year of the bill. Then the tenth year eliminated the estate tax, as part of a compromise reached back in 2001. Nobody thought that we would ever get to the repeal year, but the Senate failed to take action on a House bill last December, and the tax suddenly disappeared. A few Senators think that they can cover the mounting losses with a retroactive tax, but the further we get from Jan. 1, when the tax was repealed, the less likely that is.
The Senate could still take up that House bill to extend the estate tax, but at this point it seems to be the furthest thing from their collective minds.
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