WPCNR'S HILLARY ON THE HILL. By Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. June 8, 2006: “Today the Senate has rightly rejected another shortsighted attempt to repeal the estate tax.  It is my hope that today’s vote sends a clear message that another tax cut for the wealthiest Americans at a cost of $1 trillion is exactly the wrong priority for this nation.

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Indeed, we are still in a time of record deficits, sacrifices are being made by our troops in harms way in Iraq and Afghanistan and many areas of the Gulf Coast remain unlivable with its residents dispersed throughout the country.  We have raised the debt limit to $9 trillion. Foreign countries now finance more than half of our government’s public debt, and we now spend more money each year simply paying the interest on that debt than we do on education, homeland security and veterans’ health care combined.  We would have had to borrow even more from the foreign governments of China, Japan, Saudi Arabia and others that currently hold the note on half of our public debt to help finance this tax cut.  

But ultimately, the burden of paying for these tax cuts would have fallen on the middle class.  The same middle class that has seen their wages squeezed; their job security, health care and pension benefits eroded; the costs of educating their children skyrocket and their ability to receive quality health care compromised by astronomical costs would have been called upon to shoulder the burden of an even more crushing national debt.  

To be clear, with the repeal of the estate tax, we would not be adding $1 trillion to the deficit to finance our military in Iraq and Afghanistan, to protect our borders, to make sure we’re ready for a flu pandemic, to implement long term energy independence, to make sure that our threatened cities are safe from terrorism or natural disasters, to fix our crumbling public infrastructure or to enact a long term fix to the Alternative Minimum Tax.

Repeal of the inheritance tax would have set aside $1 trillion so that the small fraction of millionaires and billionaires in this country would pay nothing when they transfer their huge estates to their heirs. 

While there is a willingness to support reasonable estate tax proposals that would ensure that virtually no small business owner or farmer would ever face a penny of estate tax liability at a fraction of the cost of full repeal, the Republican leadership chose to proceed with a shortsighted and fiscally irresponsible plan.  I am encouraged that sensibility prevailed and this unacceptable measure was defeated today.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton