While much of the attention regarding the looming expiration of the Bush tax cuts is focused on where income tax rates will be set, the 2011 estate tax rate also has yet to be resolved. As a reminder, the estate tax, which is levied on inheritance, doesn’t exist this year, but comes back next year at the 2001 level of 55 percent with a $1 million exemption (meaning the first million is passed on entirely tax-free) due to a Bush-era budgeting gimmick.

Instead of allowing that reset to occur, the Obama administration has proposed setting the estate tax permanently at 45 percent with a $3.5 million exemption. But conservatives in both the Senate and the House — led by Sens. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) — want to see a 35 percent rate and a $5 million exemption.

The Kyl-Lincoln plan to cut the estate tax would cost about $91 billion over ten years. Today, Bloomberg pointed to a Congressional Research Service report, which found that those billions would be spent to save just 0.1 percent of estates from a possible tax increase:

The Congressional Research Service says using [President Obama's] parameters in 2011 would subject 0.25 percent of U.S. estates to any tax in 2011 and generate $18.1 billion in revenue. By contrast, a 55 percent top rate, with a $1 million exclusion, would affect 1.76 percent of estates and generate $34.4 billion in revenue, the CRS said. That’s enough to fund the departments of Labor and State. The Kyl-Lincoln approach would subject just 0.14 percent of estates to any tax and generate $11.2 billion, according to the CRS.

At the 2008 level, which is slightly higher than Obama’s proposal, just 0.6 percent of deaths resulted in any estate tax liability at all. Under Obama’s plan, just 0.25 percent of estates in the country would conceivably have to pay the estate tax, but Lincoln and Kyl want to spend billions to lop another 0.11 percent off of that.

And how rich are these estates Lincoln and Kyl are working so hard to defend? Well, at the 2009 level, 62.5 percent of estate tax revenue comes from estates worth more than $20 million and another 35 percent comes from estates worth between $5 million and $20 million.

With Congress refusing to fund unemployment benefits and middle-class government workers being asked to swallow a pay freeze, spending billion of dollars on a tax break for the richest quarter percent of households in the country would be completely unconscionable. But such a move is actually on the table for the current lame-duck session.

Unless Congress acts by the end of next month, the Bush tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 are set to expire, with the tax code essentially reverting to where it was under President Bill Clinton. While Democrats and President Obama have said that they want to preserve the tax cuts for the middle-class — saving $830 billion over ten years by allowing the cuts to expire for the richest two percent of Americans — Republicans have steadfastly refused to consider anything but an across-the-board extension.

The expiration of the Bush tax cuts was put into law to mask their long-term cost, and so that they could pass under budget reconciliation rules (and thus not be subjected to a filibuster). Even so, the second round of tax cuts — the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 — barely scraped by in the Senate.

After a tied 50-50 vote, Vice-President Dick Cheney cast the deciding aye to move the Bush tax cuts forward. And in a segment of Brit Hume’s six-hour documentary, The Right, All Along: The Rise, Fall & Future of Conservatism, which aired on Fox News this weekend, Cheney brags about how his vote was the culmination of a 30 year push to put supply-side economic theory into practice:

I became a believer. If you fast-forward, in 2003, where we cut the capital gains rate, the rate on interest, did the across-the-board cuts in the income tax, and passed by a single vote. My vote.

Watch it:

Since Hume’s documentary is basically a love letter to Arthur Laffer and supply-side economics, the Bush tax cuts are portrayed as a glorious moment in economic history. But looking at the facts distorts that pretty picture. First, following the Bush tax cuts, the country “registered the weakest jobs and income growth in the post-war period”:

Overall monthly job growth was the worst of any cycle since at least February 1945, and household income growth was negative for the first cycle since tracking began in 1967. Women reversed employment gains of previous cycles. And for African Americans, the worst job growth on record was matched by an unprecedented increase in poverty.

Under President Clinton, job creation, GDP growth, wage growth, and business investment were all stronger than they were under Bush. In fact, the only economic indicators that went up under Bush were deficits and the poverty rate. But Cheney is still crowing, as the country tries to crawl out from the economic catastrophe that occurred on his watch.

Yesterday, David Stockman, budget director under President Reagan, blasted the Republican party for creating a “theology” regarding tax cuts. “After 1985, the Republican Party adopted the idea that tax cuts can solve the whole problem, and that therefore in the future, deficits didn’t matter and tax cuts would be the solution of first, second, and third resort,” Stockman said. Indeed, it was Cheney himself who allegedly claimed that “deficits don’t matter.”

Cross-posted on ThinkProgress.

Unless Congress acts by tomorrow, 2.5 million Americans will lose their extended unemployment benefits, even though unemployment is still above nine percent and there are currently five unemployed workers for every job opening. In the last forty years, the U.S. has never allowed jobless benefits to expire with unemployment so high.

At the same time, Congress is also faced with the December 31st expiration of the Bush tax cuts. Today, in two separate interviews, Sen.-elect Mark Kirk (R-IL) tried to bolster his fiscal conservative credentials by saying that extending unemployment insurance without finding spending cuts to offset the extension would be “misguided” because of its effect on the deficit. However, Kirk also called for extending all of the Bush tax cuts, “no matter what” the effect on the nation’s budget:

KIRK: We should extend the Bush tax cuts and make sure we don’t have a double-dip recession. And I have the honor to be the first of ninety-five new Republicans, fiscal conservatives, to help right our ship of state. [...]

Q: The first thing you’re talking about is deficit reduction and spending. Does that mean that right now, as of today, you’d be against extending the unemployment insurance?

KIRK: That’s right. You could extend it if you found a way to pay for it. And I voted for that in the past. But these proposals to extend unemployment insurance by just adding it to the deficit are misguided.

Watch it:

Kirk actually claimed that extending benefits — which costs $60 billion for one year, or $12.5 billion for a three-month extension — would lead to a Irish-style debt crisis, while glossing over the $4 trillion cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for a decade ($830 billion of which goes to only the richest two percent of Americans). Even MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough saw through Kirk’s double-talk, asking, “if [the tax cuts] are not paid for though, do we not risk going the way, as you said, of Greece and Ireland?”

As the New York Times editorial board wrote, “opponents would have you believe that the nation cannot afford to keep paying unemployment benefits: a yearlong extension would cost about $60 billion. The truth is, we cannot afford not to…Without jobs, there is inadequate spending, and that means ever fewer jobs. A wide range of private and government studies show that unemployment benefits combat that vicious cycle by ensuring that families can buy the basics.”

Of course, Kirk is no stranger to fraudulent fiscal conservative rhetoric. During the campaign, he paired his call for massive new tax cuts with a budget-cutting plan that included only one actual spending cut, reducing the budget by less than one percent.