Cohn: Gary Cohn doesn't care about the estate tax, I can guarantee you. I can guarantee you.

Harwood: You're the one who said only a moron pays the estate tax.

Cohn: I can guarantee you Gary Cohn doesn't care about the estate tax.

Harwood: When you look at the actual number of real farms that pay the estate tax, it is tiny — in the dozens.

Cohn: Well, I think people have managed to keep themselves below the estate tax. This is the whole issue. Many people are smart enough to know how to manage themselves out of the estate tax. So, if you have a family farm that's big enough that it's going to hit the estate tax, you start paying lawyers, consultants, and accountants to break up your land, and break up your farm, and giving it to the kids when the families would prefer to keep the farm intact, keep it whole, and manage it as one big farm.
We're forcing people into irrational behavior, when we'd like to keep them in rational behavior, and run the farm as one big farm.

Harwood: Are you seriously saying with a straight face that getting rid of the estate tax is about farmers and not about very wealthy families?

Cohn: What I'm saying is that it benefits farms, it benefits small businesses, it benefits a lot of different people.

Harwood: Small businesses with more than $11 million estates?

Cohn: We do not believe that death should be a taxable event.

Harwood: How does it stimulate the economy?

Cohn: Well, look, we want that farmer to go out and buy the next piece of land, and the next piece of land, and the next piece of land, and create the economies of scale and be able to compete in the world. That makes sense to me. We want the small business to go double the production line and not have to worry about the size of his factory, worrying that, "Oh my God, I may incur estate tax and my family is going to have to sell this business."

Harwood: Another thing Larry Summers told me: 'The country wants to spend more on defense. We've got a whole lot of baby boomers retiring. We are going to need more money for government and not less.' The Penn-Wharton model — run by a former Bush administration economist, not a Democrat — says that this plan by 2040 will lose $4 trillion. During that time, the number of people on Social Security is going to go from 45 million to 72 million. How in the world does that make sense?

Cohn: We firmly believe that we are creating a model that creates economic growth in this country.

Harwood: But you know no tax cut's ever paid for itself.

Cohn: The years that we increased deficit are years when our economy is slowing down. We continue to borrow more and more money. So, the number one thing we can do for the United States citizens is to grow the economy. This tax plan is meant to grow the economy.

Harwood: Are you thinking that you'll deal with that Social Security/Medicare/baby boomer retirement issue later by entitlement reform that reduces benefits?

Cohn: Look, the president on the economic front laid out three core principles. Number one was reg reform, number two was taxes and number three was infrastructure. We're working our way methodically through reg reform, taxes and infrastructure. I think when he gets done with those, I think welfare is going to come up. That's our near-term economic agenda right now.

Maybe a dumb question, but do these new tax laws have some sort of language that keeps them in place even if the DNC takes over Congress and/or The White House? Or are they pretty easy to reverse?

Eliminating the estate tax is such an odd cross to choose to die upon.

Not a dumb question. We'd need the text of the bill to know for sure. For example, Bush's tax cuts were for a specific time period and set by law to expire in 2010. Obama and Congress extended them for a year or two and then allowed them to expire, so no action was needed for the top marginal rate to increase from 35 to 39.6%.

I think I've read about this bill being described as a permanent tax cut, in which case there would need to be specific legislation to change the tax rates again. But who knows. We are far from a final version of this bill.

You commented on that story when I posted it two pages ago.

I mean, it's worth revisiting.

Does that mean no pee tape?

Oh man. I B'ed myself.