On February 3, Virginia’s House of Delegates voted 69-29 to repeal its state estate tax, bucking a trend among state legislatures to work to preserve the tax’s revenue in a time of record setting state deficits. Governor Mark Warner (D) had petitioned hard to preserve this piece of revenue for Virginia, which is facing an estimated 1.1 billion budget gap for FY 2004, but the vote is being touted by the Republican-controlled legislative body as a “veto-proof” majority. Though repeal advocates in Virginia argued that repeal would protect the state’s small farms and family businesses, data from the USDA and the Federal Reserve show that both the average large farm and family business in Virginia already fall well below the current $1 million exemption under federal law.

The President (faced with a 6 percent unemployment rate, increased homeland security needs and costs, and a projected $300 billion deficit for the coming year) has decided that repeal of the estate tax must be made permanent – at all costs. And the costs are great: nearly $56 billion in the first full year of repeal. But you wouldn’t know it from the President’s budget charts.

The National Priorities Project recently released two comprehensive reports that provide very useful state-by-state, as well as nation-wide, data. The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy's Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in all Fifty States shows that, on average, state and local tax systems require the poorest taxpayers to pay the highest effective tax rates.

On January 13, 2003, Responsible Wealth held a press conference on preserving the federal estate tax, which featured William H. Gates, Sr., the co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, George Soros, chair of Soros Fund Management, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND), and Chuck Collins, co-founder of United for a Fair Economy.

Included among its questionable first actions in the 108th Congress, the Republican-led House Ways and Means Committee made two new troubling rule changes that will govern House legislation around the federal budget.