A majority of legislators in the House has signed on to support a bill that could repeal the estate tax—payments that Bill and Hillary Clinton have been trying to limit.
"The Death Tax Repeal Act of 2013," sponsored by Rep. Kevin Brady (R., Texas), has 221 representatives backing the bill, according to Ryan Ellis, a tax policy expert with Americans for Tax Reform.
Ellis writes:
It now appears that the U.S. House of Representatives might soon do something it hasn’t done since 2005—vote to kill the death tax. Americans for Tax Reform, whom I work for as Tax Policy Director, has worked on behalf of death tax repeal since the 1990s and has been active in getting Congress to the brink of this historic vote. Events today mean we’re on the cusp of finally voting in the House to kill the death tax.
Yes, there is still a death tax in the U.S. tax code, and it’s doing nearly as much damage as ever. As part of the post-fiscal cliff deal, the current contours of the death tax took its permanent shape: there is a 40 percent top federal rate on taxable estates. There is a kind of death tax "standard deduction" of up to $10.3 million for surviving spouses, and half that for everyone else (all numbers indexed to inflation).