Congress Must Repeal The Death Tax

Floor Speech

Mr. SMITH of Nebraska. Mr. Speaker, the estate tax, also known as the death tax, has been a drag on America's family-owned small businesses for decades. It threatens our Nation's farms and ranches, the very businesses which produce 86 percent of U.S. agricultural products.

Farmers and ranchers work their entire lives to build their land and equipment for their operations; yet the existence of the death tax could take it all away.

The death tax impedes economic growth because it lowers incentives for small family businesses to invest capital in their own economic endeavors. In other words, it punishes success.

This flies in the face of the very principles upon which our country was founded.

The estate tax is inappropriate, and it needs to be eliminated once and for all. Doing so in the right way would lift a tremendous weight off the shoulders of America's family-owned small businesses, farms, and ranches.

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