Despite the votes of a bipartisan group of House members, the Clinton-Gore Administration sadly prevailed in its effort to keep the death tax and hurt small businessmen and farmers all over our country.

Seventy-five percent of the new jobs in this country are created by small business, and the death tax is a direct threat to those jobs. First, many small business-owning families are forced to sell their companies in order to pay the death tax. Second, they often have to sell to large corporations, sometimes owned by foreign interests. So the death tax costs jobs and centralizes economic power into the hands of the super-rich.

The Clinton-Gore Administration won today in its effort to keep the death tax in place; but American workers, consumers, small businesses and farmers were the big losers.