6 New Estate Tax Bills in Congress Now

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It seems no one in Washington is happy with the estate tax. Lawmakers have been busy since the beginning of 2023 introducing bills to address it — from Democratic proposals to hike taxes on the biggest estates to Republican plans to eliminate the tax entirely.

Alex Durante, an economist at the Tax Foundation, told ThinkAdvisor Wednesday in an email that President Joe Biden has “expressed continued interest in making reforms to the estate tax, including in his budget proposal earlier this year,” in which he floated a tax on unrealized capital gains at death for estates above $1 million.

Tax Foundation modeling finds that the proposal in Biden’s budget “would have a negative, albeit minimal, impact on economic growth and raise little revenue in the short term, but some revenue in the long run,” Durante said. “However, with a divided Congress, the chances of any major tax hikes — including on estates — have little chance of being implemented.”

One bill, the Fair Tax Act, introduced in January by Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter, R-Ga., would replace federal personal income, corporate income, payroll and estate and gift taxes with a national retail sales tax.

The proposal, which is not new, “would create a ‘family consumption allowance,’ a type of universal basic income,” William Gale and Kyle Pomerleau of Brookings write in a March blog about the legislation. The bill, the two say, “would also eliminate the IRS and has a trigger that would eliminate the sales tax if the 16th Amendment were not repealed in seven years.”

In their review, Gale and Pomerleau explain why they believe the Fair Tax proposal “is essentially unworkable.”

See the gallery for six new estate tax bills in Congress now.

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