Stop Bonuses For Dead Senators and Repeal the Death Tax!

/PRNewswir/ -- Just as Congress was adjourning to campaign for reelection, the U.S. Senate voted to pay Senator Byrd's family a $193,400 Death Bonus.

"This was a blatant display of Washington cronyism at its worst," said Dr. Lawrence A. Hunter, President of the Alliance for Retirement Prosperity. "I would applaud a charitable act from our elitists in the Senate, but not one Senator took a thin dime out of his/her pocket. They took it out of ours!"

The Alliance for Retirement Prosperity is calling on all outraged citizens to sign a petition to protest this outrage and to call for the repeal of the Federal Estate Tax, commonly known as the Death Tax. The petition is available at http://wethealliance.com/alliance/petition-letter.

"When the Death Tax hurts small businesses, kills jobs and destroys family farms, it punishes precisely the kind of behavior society should want to reward: hard work, good sense, savings; it rewards behavior that should be discouraged: extravagance, overconsumption and leisure.

"The easiest way to avoid all death taxes is to spend your money before you go. But work hard, reinvest your earnings and leave your life's savings to your loved ones and the IRS becomes one of your heirs. Death should not be a taxable event.

"Americans work tirelessly their entire lives to provide for their families to build up a nest egg for their families for when they pass on. However, when Senators die their family receives a death bonus on top of all the other benefits government employees receive. If the Senate feels so strongly about paying the family a death bonus, then perhaps they should pool their own money and pay it out of their pocket instead of burdening the taxpayer."

New FRC Study: Estate Tax Repeal Will Increase Jobs, Grow the Economy, and Boost Government Revenue

/PRNewswire/ -- Today Family Research Council and the American Family Business Foundation released an important new report analyzing the effects of the estate (or "Death" tax) on jobs, government revenues, and economic growth.

The report, "Repealing Death Tax Will Create Jobs and Boost Economy," combines two recent analyses of the death tax by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former Congressional Budget Office director, and Stephen J. Entin, president and executive director of the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation (IRET).

"The Death Tax kills jobs, family prosperity and necessary federal revenues," said FRC President Tony Perkins. "It is regressive, punitive taxation at its worst, and shows how Washington's impulse to redistribute wealth only produces less growth and greater economic inequity. Put simply, the Death Tax needs to die."

The new report provides compelling documentation for why the death tax should be eliminated or, at the very least, not be raised. Among the reports' findings:

-- Eliminating the Death Tax could create over 1.5 million jobs for
family and small business workers.
-- An increase in the Death Tax rates to 55 percent with only a $1
million exemption would eliminate 500,000 jobs.
-- The distortion the Death Tax causes with respect to other tax
collection methods results in a net revenue decrease for the federal
government. Government could bring in nearly twice the revenue with no
death tax at all.
-- Ending the Death Tax would add $119 billion to GDP. Allowing the rates
to revert to 2001 law, 55 percent with only a $1 million exemption,
would reduce GDP by $183 billion.
-- Ending the Death Tax would boost workers' income by $79 billion.
-- The Death Tax targets America's main economic engine -- small
businesses. Small businesses have been responsible for 60 to 80
percent of all net new jobs in the last decade.
-- Large publicly traded corporations pay no Death Tax at all. Thus,
family businesses undergo repeated trauma as they are passed from one
generation of employers to the next, while their publicly traded
competitors gain a strong competitive advantage.

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