On June 18th, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 8, the “Death Tax Repeal Permanency Act of 2003,” which would make permanent the repeal of the estate tax, currently scheduled to take place in 2010 (thus the proposed law would take effect only in 2011 and beyond). The bill passed the House by a vote of 264-163, primarily with Republican backing, and with 41 Democrats and four Republicans breaking rank with their colleagues. (Vote Results)

After hijacking the child tax credit with add-ons that inflated the cost to $82 billion, House GOP leaders continue this month in their headlong rush to drain resources from government by cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy. The campaign has just moved from the outrageous to the egregious.

The “Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation of 2003” bill (HR 2) that President Bush signed into law with much fanfare on May 28 is chock full of tax cuts that “sunset” – that is, they revert back to pre-2003 law. When combined with the previous Bush tax cut, “The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001,” which is also full of tax cuts that slowly phase in and then end altogether, the result is like something out of Kafka. However, the difficulty for the IRS of creating forms and instructions to reflect yearly changes and taxpayer confusion are not the worst consequences of these bills.