The equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment should be extended to estates.
Extending the estate tax cut would benefit the estates of the wealthiest 0.3 percent of Americans who die in 2013 — about 7,000 people.
Most tax advisers thought that Congress would extend the estate tax before it was due to expire at the end of last year.
The WSJ estimates that it (along with extending some estate and gift tax provisions and indexing the AMT for inflation) would achieve $110 billion in deficit reduction in 2020 (covering about 10% of that year's deficit).
At least three other rural-state Democratic senators have proposed extending current estate tax rates: Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jon Tester of Montana and Mark Pryor of Arkansas.
Job creation will probably have to wait until next year but the House is determined to extend the estate tax break permanently before leaving for the holidays, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md).
Among the exceptions, which the House is likely to consider in the 112th Congress, are the health care repeal bill (scheduled for a vote a week from Wednesday), the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, an AMT patch, extending the estate tax, and more.
A real estate group that helped fuel the housing bubble is now warning that if homebuyer sweeteners aren't extended, the real estate market will continue to founder.
An heir to the A.&P. fortune, Mr. Hartford, now 93, whose interests extended to real estate, writing plays and film production, intended the museum as a home for his personal art collection.
Fantastical for iPhone is all-around an improvement on the standard version that ships with iOS, with quick access to both week/day and monthly overviews of your schedule, super-speedy new event input and a design that makes maximum use of the iPhone 5's extended screen real estate to show you as much contextual information about your day's events as possible.
