House Votes to End Federal Estate Tax

This article–“House Votes to End Federal Estate Tax as Senate Battle Looms“–by David Firestone for the New York Times (free subscription required) discusses how the House of Representatives voted yesterday to end the federal estate tax in a vote of 264 to 163, with 41 Democrats joining the Republican majority. The federal estate tax was scheduled to disappear in 2010, but then reappear in 2011 under a “sunset provision.” The measure approved by the House would end that “sunset provision” and kill the tax permanently in 2011. President Bush issued a statement praising the House for its vote, but Republicans and Democrats in the Senate expressed more interest in a substitute bill. The article reports that Senate Republicans “agreed today to meet their House counterparts in a conference about another divisive tax issue, increasing the child tax credit for 6.5 million families who did not receive it in the tax law signed by Mr. Bush last month.”