Congress is back in Washington working on the budget reconciliation process, but one proposal to remove stepped up basis is causing serious concerns with farmers.
The Biden administration says that 98 percent of family farms will not see an increase in taxes if they remove stepped up in basis, but ranking member Glenn Thompson finds that hard to believe.
“I hear a lot of claims and they are top line claims. They are headlines they want to make with no detail to be able to fill in, and there’s a difference between talking points and facts,” he states.
He partnered with Sen. John Boozman to request a Texas A&M study on the proposal, which found the exact opposite of the administration’s claim suggesting that only 2 percent of farms would avoid higher taxes.
“I don’t think anyone would challenge the credibility of the Texas A&M organization that we utilized-- you know the 2 percent of the farms that will not see a tax increase, those farms didn’t own their own acreage... which makes sense,” he explains. “It’s what you own that’s where the death tax or inheritance tax comes in.”
He says that the entire reconciliation process is out of order: “Anything that’s in that bill is really flawed from my perspective because we have not had an opportunity to systematically hear from the farmers, the ranchers, the agri-business, the commodity groups. This is Washington bureaucrats driving agricultural policy. That’s now how we do things. That’s why we have these Farm Bills.”
He says that there are other priorities the House should be dealing with right now, including preparing for the next Farm Bill.
“We should be having hearing oversight hearings. We should be looking at the impact of the disruption of the food supply chain that happened in 2020 with coronavirus. We should be learning from the lessons of coronavirus to see how do we build resiliency, all across our nation, so that in the event this happens again, that we’re prepared for it. But what we shouldn’t be doing is putting our country again to debt and just not a one-sided partisan, liberal spending plan,” according to Thompson.
On Friday, the House Ag meeting spent several hours working through the details and voting on amendments for their part of the bill.
For the full interview, click HERE
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