Practically every conservative organization has been lobbying for the last 10 years to remove the Alternate Minimum Tax (AMT) and repeal the Estate Tax. The very large donors have spent millions of dollars in this effort.
The expressed purpose of AMT is to limit taxpayers from reaping too much benefit under the regular income tax law. Let’s look at a recent examples of what the AMT did. Part of President Trump’s 2005 has been leaked to the public. It showed that Trump would have paid 3.3% of his 2005 income as federal income taxes if it was not for the AMT which brought it up to 25%.
The Estate Tax is also part of the lobbying effort to repeal it. The purpose of the Estate tax is to capture probable capital gains which had never been taxed and would never be taxed under the existing rules. . For 2017, the estate and gift tax exemption is $5.49 million per individual, up from $5.45 million in 2016. That means an individual can leave $5.49 million to heirs and pay no federal estate or gift tax. The main lobby effort seems to always claim the heirs would have to sell the family farm to pay the tax.. Let’s look at what the US Dept of Agriculture REALLY Says on the Estate tax:”… it is estimated that only 1.7 percent of farm estates would be required to file an estate tax return for the 2016 tax year. A much smaller share of estates (0.42 percent) is estimated to owe any Federal estate tax. “ To put 0.42% in perspective, this is 42 out of 10,000 farm estates! How many of these do you think are small family farms?
The respected non-partisan Tax Policy Center has just recently estimated for the time period the proposed tax revision will be gauged that the AMT removal will increase the federal debt by 439.5 billion dollars and the removal of the estate tax will cost 238.9 billion dollars. This would be a total increase in the federal debt by 678.4 billion dollars. A question to ask is- What does this do for the middle class? I bet you can figure out what this does for the 1%.
Will someone please find my lobbyist and have the lobbyist get to work for my best interest.