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

And we offered two different options to do that in this debate. Both of the Democratic bills in the House and the Senate would allow family farmers and small businesses to leave at least $4 million per couple without paying any estate tax. That's up from $1 million, where we're going today.

Unlike the Republican plan, which would make them wait 10 years to get the full benefits, so as to disguise the real cost of a total repeal of the estate tax, the Democratic plans provide immediate relief. The Democratic proposal in the Senate actually eliminated two-thirds of the families from paying the estate tax, covering virtually every so-called small business and family farm in the country, and leaving the people that Martin talked about, for which the estate tax was designed. The House plan left a few more families in the estate tax, but cut the rate for everybody, on the grounds that other rates had been cut in recent years.

The point I want to make is that our party is not against reasonable estate tax relief, nor do we think that people should use all claim for making a fairness case to their government just because they're in upper income levels. But this bill is wrong. It is wrong on grounds of fairness; it is wrong on grounds of fiscal responsibility. It shows a sense of priorities that I believe got us in trouble in the first place in the 1980's and that, if we go back to those priorities, will get us in trouble again.

So I say again to our friends in the Republican Party, John Sumption and Martin Rothenberg made a lot of sense today. They spoke for the best of America. We are not against wealth, and we are not against opportunity. If I were against creating millionaires, I have been an abject failure in my 8 years as President. [Laughter] We are not against making it possible for farmers and small business people to pass their operations along so that their children do not have to sell the enterprise just to pay the estate tax. Everybody thinks that's wrong.

We are willing to work with you in good faith to modify this estate tax and to take a whole lot of people, including the majority of those now paying it, out from under it entirely if you're willing to work with us. But we are not willing to turn our backs on the rest of the American people who deserve tax relief, who have to have good schools, who have to have good health care, and most important of all, have to have a fiscal policy that keeps us paying the debt down, keeps interest rates low, and keeps the future bright.

And I will just leave you with this one last thought. We have a new study which shows that if we keep on our path and keep paying this debt down, instead of giving away all the projected surplus in tax cuts, it will keep interest rates another percent a year lower for the next decade, which is worth another $250 billion home mortgages, another $30 billion in car payments, and another $15 billion in college loan payments. That is a very big amount of relief to most people in this country.