It’s gone largely unnoticed by the national media that key Senate players are progressing toward a compromise on the estate tax that would limit the tax to only the very wealthiest Americans, and, along the way, greatly reduce federal revenues generated by that tax.
One paper that has reported the on subject periodically over the past few months is — not surprisingly — the Wall Street Journal. Yesterday the Journal published a story (subscription required) suggesting that the proposal could be passed by the Senate by the end of the summer.
Alas, in its final paragraphs, the otherwise informative article falls prey to one of CJR Daily’s pet peeves. Just a few weeks ago we caught the Dallas Morning News passing off corporate PR as fact in the concluding sentences of an article. Sadly, the Journal piece did the same with a Bush stump speech.
Here are the last two paragraphs from yesterday’s piece:
Mr. Bush has pushed for permanent repeal in stump speeches, most recently last week at an appearance before an agricultural audience in Pennsylvania.
“In order to make sure our farms stay within our farming families, we need to get rid of the death tax once and for all,” he said then. “It makes no sense … to tax a person’s assets twice, once while they’re living and again after they die. For the sake of family farmers, Congress needs to get rid of the death tax forever.”
Holding up family farms as victims of the tax code is classic Bush, and the Journal should know better than to print his remarks without comment. As Factcheck.org pointed out earlier this month, the Tax Policy Center, a left-leaning think tank, found that only 440 taxable estates last year consisted primarily of farm and business assets.
As the Journal noted in its piece, the same think tank estimated that 19,000 estates owed taxes for 2004. Thus, estates composed primarily of farm and business assets constituted only 2.3 percent of all taxable estates. If you include estates with any farm or business activity, that grows to 37 percent — still well short of a majority.
–Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.