Providing for Consideration of Senate Amendment to House Amendment to Senate Amendment to H.R. 4853, Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Acot of 2020

Floor Speech

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Mr. COHEN. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the chairlady for giving me this opportunity.

I wasn't going to support the rule this morning, but I am going to support it now. I am going to support it because I want to be able to vote to make the estate tax more reasonable, even though the reality is, what we are voting on is whether we are going to give the wealthy with the estate tax a six-course meal with wine or a seven-course meal with wine, and we should be talking about a meat and three.

The fact is, the estate tax with a $675,000 exemption was started with the Bush tax cuts, and now we are putting it up to a $5 million exemption per person and $10 million per couple. It was at a 55 percent rate and precipitously drops in this bill to 35 percent. The benefit to the heirs of the richest people in this country is unbelievable, unfathomable. And what that means, you will have a continued concentration of wealth in a few select families, lords so to speak, princes that have money beyond what anybody needs to have in this Nation and not contribute to others. The fact is, this was a very difficult vote, a very difficult decision for me. I asked my constituents to let me know what they thought. I had hundreds of people call and write and contribute to a poll, and it was about even, for and against.

The fact is, the future of our Nation is at risk. These tax cuts for the most wealthy people in our Nation, for corporations that will not produce jobs, in the hundreds of billions of dollars category, and the inheritance tax will take away the children, the aged, and the needy in years to come who will need support from this Nation. The deficit will be so great that when it comes time for deficit cutting, the cuts are going to come to the people who most are in need.

Hubert Humphrey said, ``The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.'' He and others, like Dr. King, the Dalai Lama, and others who you look to never talk about giving more to the rich. Mr. Garamendi started talking about Franklin Roosevelt. The fact is, those people who are the moral tests will suffer when the cuts are made, and I don't see that as something I should support. I cannot be sure of that.

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