They have no documentation of anybody losing anything. There are no examples; it hasn't happened. You can't cite cases. Nobody has lost the farm. Wanting it to happen as an AHa moment doesn't mean it has actually happened. There are no cases. There are no names. It hasn't happened.
See #3 cbpp.org
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And from the beginning, the winners of the successful Republican crusade against the estate would never included family farmers. As incoming Speaker John Boehner put it in 2009:
"People who aren't wealthy, who may have built up value in land over generations and many family farms find themselves in situations where they've got to sell the farm in order the pay the taxes."
Unfortunately, that claim is just as false today as when George W. Bush uttered it during and after the 2000 presidential campaign. Now as in 2001, Republicans wrongly claimed that the estate tax led to the loss of family farms. When President Bush blasted opponents who say "the death tax doesn't cause people to sell their farms" with a mocking "don't know who they're talking to in Iowa," neither Hawkeye State farmers nor researchers could name one. As David Cay Johnston, among the nation's leading journalists when it comes to tax issues, conclude in the New York Times nine years ago:
Almost no working farmers do, according to data from an Internal Revenue Service analysis of 1999 returns that has not yet been published. Neil Harl, an Iowa State University economist whose tax advice has made him a household name among Midwest farmers, said he had searched far and wide but had never found a farm lost because of estate taxes. "It's a myth," he said. Even one of the leading advocates for repeal of estate taxes, the American Farm Bureau Federation, said it could not cite a single example of a farm lost because of estate taxes.
The future looks no different. In 2009, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) estimated that only 1 in 500 estates (0.24%) was impacted by the $3.5 million per person threshold and 45% tax rate House Democrats sought to continue. And last year, the Tax Policy Center quantified just how few family farms or small businesses are actually impacted by the estate tax proposals under consideration, including the $5 million exemption and 35% rate advocated by Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and now to be signed into law by President Obama:
We estimate that under the Obama proposal, 100 family farms and businesses would owe tax. (We define such estates as those where farm or business assets are valued at under $5 million and comprise the majority of estate assets.) The Lincoln-Kyl proposal would cut the number to 40. Even under current law, fewer than 2,700 family farms and businesses would owe tax.
But thanks to the new tax bill, one family-owned business - Walmart - could reap a multi-billion dollar bonanza.
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