by hilzoy
From Time:
"Federal troops aren't the only ones looking for bodies on the Gulf Coast. On Sept. 9, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions called his old law professor Harold Apolinsky, co-author of Sessions' legislation repealing the federal estate tax, which was encountering sudden resistance on the Hill. Sessions had an idea to revitalize their cause, which he left on Apolinsky's voice mail: "[Arizona Sen.] Jon Kyl and I were talking about the estate tax. If we knew anybody that owned a business that lost life in the storm, that would be something we could push back with."If legislative ambulance chasing looks like a desperate measure, for the backers of repealing the estate tax, these are desperate times. Just three weeks ago, their long-sought goal of repeal seemed within reach, but Katrina dashed their hopes when Republican leaders put off an expected vote. After hearing from Sessions, Apolinsky, an estate tax lawyer who says his firm includes three multi-billionaires among its clients, mobilized the American Family Business Institute, a Washington-based group devoted to estate tax repeal. They reached out to members along the Gulf Coast to hunt for the dead.
It's been hard. Only a tiny percentage of people are affected by the estate tax—in 2001 only 534 Alabamans were subject to it. And for Hill backers of repeal, that's only part of the problem. Last year, the tax brought in $24.8 billion to the federal government. With Katrina's cost soaring, estate tax opponents need to find a way to make up the potential lost income. For now, getting repeal back on the agenda may depend on Apolinsky and his team of estate-sniffing sleuths, who are searching Internet obituaries among other places. Has he found any victims of both the hurricane and the estate tax? "Not yet," Apolinsky says. "But I'm still looking.""
"Legislative ambulance chasing"? This is legislative hearse chasing in support of a measure that was indefensible even before Katrina. Now, faced with unforeseen costs that will run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, the idea of repealing the estate tax is insane: the cost of doing so over a decade (2012-2021) would be nearly a trillion dollars.
Luckily, they'll have a hard time finding the particular sort of corpse they're looking for. According to the Congressional Budget Office (pdf), working from 2000 tax returns, at today's $1.5 million exemption, only 13,771 of the estates that filed in 2000 would have owed any estate tax at all. If we recalculate using the exemption that goes into effect next year, the number drops to 6,337 estates, in the entire country. And very few of these are either family-owned businesses or farms. Using today's exemptions, the numbers are 300 farms and 223 family-owned businesses; using next year's exemption, only 123 farms and 135 family-owned businesses would have owed any estate tax at all. That's in the entire US; you can imagine the difficulty of finding the two or three such people who live in areas affected by the hurricane, and finding out if any of them lost their lives.
So if, in the days to come, some Congressperson trots out the relatives of some business owner who lost his or her life in Katrina, and whose tearful relatives are now facing the ravages of the estate tax, bear in mind that in all likelihood that business owner is probably the only such person who died as a result of Hurricane Katrina, and that those relatives are only available to the media because, in the aftermath of a catastrophe, ghouls went out looking for them.
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