Remarks on Returning Without Approval to the House of Representatives the Death Tax Elimination Act of 2000 - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Sept 4, 2000

So I say, it fails on grounds of fiscal responsibility; it costs too much; and it fails on grounds of fairness. And let me just mention something else that Martin alluded to when he stood up here. I have had at least two billionaires contact me and ask me to veto this bill. And one of the reasons they cited is that it would lead to a dramatic drop in charitable contributions.

Studies show that charitable contributions could drop as much as $5 to 6 billion a year--private contributions to charitable causes--if I were to sign this complete repeal: less money for AIDS research or cancer studies, fewer resources for adoption, fewer opportunities for troubled children, fewer new acquisitions for art galleries and historical museums and historic preservation. This is an element of this bill that has been discussed almost not at all in the public domain. But it is clear that it would be one of the unintended consequences of a complete repeal of the estate tax.

I say again, the estate tax repeal is part of a larger Republican strategy to have, now, over $2 trillion of tax cuts over the next 10 years. Now, in other words, their aggregate proposals would spend all the projected non-Social Security tax cut. That leaves nothing for continued improvements of education when the student bodies are just getting larger, more and more kids, and more and more diverse.

Nothing for a voluntary Medicare prescription drug benefit, the biggest problem most seniors have. Nothing to extend the life of Medicare and Social Security beyond the baby boom generation.

Nothing to invest in scientific research and the environment.

Nothing to pay for their proposal to partially privatize Social Security, which itself would require the injection of a trillion dollars more into the Social Security Trust Fund over the next decade.

Nothing for emergencies. Remember, I told you we've already spent $600 million this year on wildfires in the West. Things happen in life. Things happen in a nation's life just like they happen in your life. Emergencies happen.

Nothing to pay for low farm prices, bad crop years, or in this case, bad foreign policy, and no telling how many billion dollars we spent in the last 3 years trying to keep people like our family farmer here in business because we passed the farm bill in 1995 that made no provision for bad years.

And by the way, the $2 trillion surplus is just an estimate, anyway. And anybody that knows anything about the Federal budget will tell you that there are just three or four technical reasons it is grossly overestimated.

So I don't think this is a fiscally responsible bill, and I don't think it is a fair bill. And therefore, I vetoed it. Now, does it mean there should be no estate tax relief? Actually, most of us Democrats believe there should be some. Why? Because of the success of the economy in recent years, we've had land values go way up for farmers in many places in the country, and many young people and not-so-young people have enjoyed a lot of success in a hurry in a booming stock market. So that there are a lot of ongoing enterprises that should be able to continue to go on, and you don't want them to have to be transferred in ownership just to pay the tax bill. That's really the unfairness issue that needs to be addressed here.