Last Minute
Shoppers
By Rebecca French
Smith
A handful of days remains in the
lame duck Congressional session. That doesn’t seem like much time. For lawmakers
in Washington, D.C., maybe it feels like Christmas Eve at 6 p.m., the malls are
closed and they haven’t done any Christmas shopping yet…and they have northward
of 300 million gifts to buy.
It’s not like
Congress hasn’t known what we want this year. In fact, these items have been on
our list for some time: a complete farm bill, a reprieve from tax increases
scheduled to go into effect in January and some solid solutions for resolving
our debt and fiscal problems.
Admittedly, I
sometimes find myself in a last-minute predicament, but when it comes to
important things, I’m usually more on the ball. If someone told me that I was
about to go over a cliff, I’d work on my trajectory to affect a different
outcome. Lawmakers and the president have known this crisis was coming. Alas,
we’re all headed for the fiscal cliff right along with the only folks in the
country who can do something about it.
That visual
imagery is dramatic, and perhaps much of the population is too desensitized.
Fiscal cliff. Taxmageddon. These words are almost comical and are at times
whispered with a half snicker or spat out like the punch line of a really bad
joke. But when the reality of the situation hits, we won’t be so numb.
Taxmageddon
sounds devastating, and that is exactly what the estate tax, aka the death tax,
will be to many American farm families when the patriarch or matriarch dies
(like that isn’t devastating enough) if Congress doesn’t act before the end of
the year. If farmers don’t have to sell the farm, at the very least, they’ll
have to make some tough decisions about which assets to sell to pay the tax
burden, which might just cripple their operation. For farm families, it’s a
crushing situation financially, emotionally and spiritually.
Is it really
that hard to sit down in Washington, without the game-playing, and address the
problems that the impending “fiscal cliff” threatens? Is it so hard to
understand the turmoil the lack of a farm bill and excessive estate taxes will
inflict if not addressed by the end of the month? Can we get on the same team
and find solutions before we go over? Do we have enough time?
I have more
questions than answers, as I’m sure many do. All I can do is take care of
business in my life—pay the bills, go to work, send the kids to school—and hope
the people in Washington, to whom we have given this incredible responsibility,
will do the same. If they don’t, Santa might not be coming down the chimney for
a few of them this Christmas, or if he does, it might only be to eat the cookies
and leave a lump of coal.
(Rebecca French Smith, of
Columbia, Mo. is a multimedia specialist for the Missouri Farm Bureau, the
state’s largest farm organization.)
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