Blogs Derek's Tax Blog A Lot of Estate Tax Static
Last year I set up an alert to give me notice of new articles that are posted relating the coming changes in the estate tax law. Typical I get a few articles a week. Most of them are repeats of the same old line.
However, this week has been different. I am getting enough of these alerts that they are jamming up my inbox! At last count there have been 161 news articles over the last week. You can check them all out here. There are an additional 125 blog entries over the last week. Taken together this represents a lot of chatter even though there really isn’t anything to report.
Most of the articles related to the PAYGO rules that I have discussed before, here and here. PAYGO or Pay-as-you-Go represents an effort to make government live within its means. However, if you read any of the analysis, you will see that the version that is being proposed now has more holes in it than Swiss cheese. One of those hole is the estate tax. Basically, PAYGO won’t get in the way of an estate tax bill this year that keeps within the joint budget resolution. I view the whole PAYGO debate as a prelude to the tax increase debate that is likely to come next year. If you look at my achieves you will see that there was some discussion shortly after Obama was elected that because of the economy we would not see tax increases in 2009. However, 2010 is a different story and there is no reason congress can’t take away in 2010 what they give us in 2009!
What I take from all of the increased static out there is that like summer, this debate is starting to heat up. Even our own Washington State delegation is in the news, see: this and that. The Seattle Globe post references a recent Rolling Stone article. For more background on McDermott’s bill see my earlier post.