Commentary from the Washington Examiner:
The American Council of Life Insurers (ACLI) spent $9.6 million on lobbying last year and is on pace to spend more than $10 million this year — and that’s on top of the lobbying efforts by its individual members, the life insurance companies. Why? One life insurance industry lobbyist estimated last year that the industry gets about 10 percent of its business through estate planning.
Frank Keating is ACLI’s president, and he lobbies Capitol Hill on tax issues. When he was a Republican governor of Oklahoma, Keating wrote a piece for the newsletter of Americans for Tax Reform that read, in part, “I believe death taxes are un-American.”
He tied the death tax to “failed collectivist schemes of the past” and praised President Bush’s plan to abolish the federal estate tax. As head of ACLI, he changed his tune and began supporting the death tax, telling the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “I am institutionally and intestinally against huge blocs of inherited wealth.”
But ACLI is hardly a Republican institution. One of Keating’s lobbying colleagues at ACLI is Kimberly Dorgan, wife of Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan, who supports the estate tax. Also, since Keating has taken over — and since permanent repeal of the estate tax has been a recurring theme on the Hill — ACLI has shifted its donation pattern.
Read more...Labels: Frank Keating
Posted at 11/19/2007 08:03:00 AM
