September 8, 2000 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The House of Representatives failed Thursday to override President Clinton’s veto of a Republican-backed bill to repeal the federal estate tax and its deduction for charitable bequests.
The vote was 274-157. An override would have required a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress.
In a statement Thursday, the president commended the House members who voted against repealing the estate tax. While Mr. Clinton said that he supports estate-tax relief aimed at family farms, small businesses, and principal residences, he added that a sweeping repeal of the tax would provide “a huge tax cut for the most well-off Americans at the expense of working families.”
Charity officials have been bitterly divided over whether killing the estate tax would hurt bequests (The Chronicle, July 27).
Some argue that even without the charitable deduction provided by the estate tax, wealthy donors would nonetheless continue to leave bequests. Others argue that eliminating the tax would erase a prime motivation for wealthy people to leave a portion of their estates to charity.
The estate tax currently is levied on estates of $675,000 or more, a threshold that is set to rise gradually to $1-million by 2006. The tax affects the richest 2 percent of Americans.
Mr. Clinton said studies indicate that repealing the estate tax would reduce private contributions to charitable causes by $5-billion to $6-billion per year.
In comments last week when he vetoed the estate-tax bill, Mr. Clinton said that repeal would mean “less money for AIDS research or cancer studies, fewer resources for adoption, fewer opportunities for troubled children, fewer new acquisitions for art galleries and historical museums, and historic preservation.”
“This is an element of this bill that has been discussed almost not at all in the public domain,” the president said of the effect that repeal of the tax would have on charitable giving. Mr. Clinton said “at least two billionaires” had contacted him and asked him to veto the estate-tax measure.
“One of the reasons they cited,” the president said, “is that it would lead to a dramatic drop in charitable contributions.”
