The Budget Brigade has learned that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), along with Sens. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) as co-sponsors, will soon introduce the "Responsible Estate Tax Act." While the bill would essentially reinstate the estate tax at 2009 levels – exempting the first $3.5 million of an individual's estate ($7 million for couples) – it has a more progressive tax rate structure that targets the wealthiest one quarter of one percent of the population, and protects small businesses and family farms.

On Tuesday, Americans for a Fair Estate Tax (AFET), a diverse coalition of public interest groups that OMB Watch is a part of and that champion a strong estate tax, adopted a new statement of principles on the tax. We argue that with both a dire need for the government to increase investment in basic public services and a credible long-term deficit problem looming, this is no time for Congress to grant further financial relief to the country's wealthiest citizens by reducing the estate tax.

It seems old Dick Patten at the American Family Business Institute (AFBI) is up to his old tricks again, trying to scare people about the estate tax with lies and distortions in an attempt to gin up support to kill the tax in Congress. This time, though, he's adopted pious language to spread the gospel of the "evils" of the tax among religious conservatives.

With the estate tax down and out for the time being, groups that for decades have sought to repeal the tax are gathering to make a push in Congress to keep the estate tax from coming back. In a recent online piece, John McKinnon of the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper whose editorial board never saw a tax repeal proposal that it didn’t like, wrote a short profile on the "small business group" the American Family Business Institute (AFBI), which McKinnon describes as currently waging an “all-out campaign for a permanent repeal.”