Cloture Motion

Floor Speech

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Mr. MORAN. Mr. President, I have the privilege of representing Kansas in the U.S. Senate and Kansans and especially the opportunity, the privilege of representing farmers and ranchers. It is a huge component of our State's economy and a significant way that we live our lives. Agriculture has molded the nature of our State generation to generation.

In agriculture, farming and ranching is one of the few remaining professions where sons and daughters still can work alongside moms and dads. They can work alongside their grandparents.

I still remember a video that a farmer proudly showed me of him and three generations of his family, so four total--him and three other generations--cutting wheat in Kansas one July summer and how proud he was to look out and see that his son was in one combine, he was in another, his father in another, his grandfather in another.

Family farming and ranching is not just important for food production. We are productive in that family farm setting. It is not just important for food production for our country and for the rest of the world, but it also is important for us in preserving our values and principles which are passed down from generation to generation.

The love of life, respect for others, the joy of earning a living, the idea that what you do every day has a consequence in feeding the world--those characteristics of Kansas farmers need to be around for the country not only today but into the future. But unfortunately, the tax-and-spend spree, the Democrats' tax proposal, is a direct assault on multigenerational farms and ranches in Kansas and across the country. These proposals threaten the ability of producers to be able to pass on their operations to that next generation.

I have watched farmers talk to their kids about where the future lies for them, and sometimes it is positive in the sense that there is hope for a bright future, and at other times, in difficult days in agriculture, it is the worry about whether or not the next generation can afford to be on that farm.

For the past century, this thing called stepped-up basis--so that the value of a piece of property for its inheritance tax purposes is valued at the date of the death of the person--the farmer in this case and rancher in this case. For this past century, stepped-up basis has been a cornerstone of our Tax Code, and it has protected family farms and ranches in their plan to transition to the next generation.

Farm- and ranchland have tripled in value since the late nineties, so even a second generation, somebody currently just now coming to the farm because of the death of a parent, could be devastatingly impacted.

For example, a 2,000-acre farm purchased in the midnineties in Kansas by a first-generation producer--kind of a typical-size farm, particularly in western Kansas. Even with a modest capital gains exemption, the inheriting farmer, the son or daughter, could face a tax liability close to a fourth of the present-day value of the land.

To keep the farm in operation to satisfy the tax liability, the son or daughter inheriting the farm would be faced with the difficult decision of either to sell a significant portion of the land that was farmed by their parents or take on even more debt in a business that is faced with increasingly tight margins. The damage would only get increasingly worse for family farms and ranches passed down through additional generations.

If the proposed changes in stepped-up basis are implemented, the big farms will get bigger by purchasing land from the smaller operations unable to meet that tax liability. The consequences would certainly be felt by the small farmer and his or her family, who are forced to sell the land, but also throughout the entire rural community in which the farms are built around.

We need those family farmers on land in Kansas producing food, fiber, and fuel for the well-being of our country and its economy, but we need them especially for the well-being of the community's future. In the absence of those family farmers and their kids, the family ranchers and their children, the ability to keep a grocery store, to have a farm store, to have an implement dealership, to support the local bank, to pay the taxes for the school--we lose those things when we lose family farmers.

Our farmers and ranchers should not be forced to shoulder the Democratic trillion-dollar spending spree to expand social programs. Our Tax Code should work for American families, not against them, and especially for family farms and ranches that often lack the cash flow to make ends meet.

I urge my colleagues, my Democratic colleagues, to reject imposing taxes, to changing the issue of stepped-up basis that is so valuable and viable for farmers' and ranchers' future, and it would endanger their ability to pass on land to the next generation of producers. It would be a bad thing for the farmers and ranchers and their families, it would be a bad thing for the community in which they live, and it would be a terrible thing for our Nation.

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