Buchanan: "I will preserve family farms and businesses" --
"Confiscatory Inheritance Taxes are Un-American"
Contact Greg Mueller / K.B. Forbes - July 11, 1995
Des Moines, Iowa -- In a press conference here this morning, Republican Presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan declared that the inheritance tax on family farms and small businesses is "un-Arnerican. unjust and anti-family." "If I am elected President," he said. "I will do everything in my power to abolish it and preserve family farms and businesses."
"One of the first things Bill Clinton did as President." Mr Buchanan said, "was to retroactively increase the inheritance tax on American families. I believe Mr. Clinton's ex post facto tax increase was unjust and unconstitutional. When I get to the Oval Office, I won't simply reverse it -- I will outright abolish inheritance taxes for small businesses and family farms.
"The confiscatory inheritance tax now imposed on American family farms and small businesses is un-American. It is a dagger blow at the very heart of the American dream.
"The pioneers who came west and settled the rolling plains of Iowa pursued the great American dream of property ownership. They built up a great country because they wanted their children and their grandchildren to live in a great country. But now the socialist spirit of Big Government in Washington is imperiling the pioneering spirit of the American heartland -- the spirit of free enterprise and private property.
"When farm families work all their lives to save, purchase land, improve it, earn their keep from it, and raise up their children on it, they have a moral right to hand it on to the next generation. When a small businessman or woman struggles and saves, risks everything he or she has, to build up a successful business, and then strives to bring up a child with the work ethic and skills to take over that business, the government has no right to step in and crush that hope under the burden of confiscatory taxes.
"As President, I will preserve family farms and small businesses from the greedy hands of government.
"That is why I would abolish the federal inheritance tax on family farms and small businesses by increasing the standard exemption on estates to $5 million and imposing a flat 20% tax rate above that level. We need a new tax system that encourages lifelong saving and enterprise and that rewards, rather than punishes, the traditional family. Because it does just that, my plan to abolish the inheritance tax for family farms and small businesses is a down payment on Restoring the American Dream."