Spending Millions to Save Billions

Birmingham News picking up on the “stealth campaign by super wealthy to repeal estate tax” reported below:

“This long-running, secretive campaign funded by some of the country’s wealthiest families has relied on deception to bamboozle the public,” said Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen.

In another article this morning the Birmingham News passes on the effort to bamboozle:

For more than 30 years, [Birmingham lawyer Harold] Apolinsky has been urging Congress to repeal the estate tax, which he says is a major reason only 30 percent of family businesses survive past the second generation. “When a business has to pay a large estate tax 90 days after the owner dies, it is no wonder so few family businesses survive,” he said.

A bamboozlement effort this big makes this info worth repeating from below (with emphasis added):

In a massive public relations campaign, the families have also misled the country by giving the mistaken impression that the estate tax affects most Americans. In particular, they have used small businesses and family farms as poster children for repeal, saying that the estate tax destroys both of these groups. But just more than one-fourth of one percent of all estates will owe any estate taxes in 2006. And the American Farm Bureau, a member of the anti-estate tax coalition, was unable when asked by The New York Times to cite a single example of a family being forced to sell its farm because of estate tax liability.