Senator Patrick Joyce spoke about estate tax legislation and his co-sponsoring an amendment related to the ag industry and generational farmland.

"I’ve been cosponsor chief cosponsor three years now of us trying to amend more mainly focusing on the agricultural state tax. Farming industry is a capital rich and especially now cash poor business. Right now, if you have generational farms, a three hundred and fifty acre farm, which is a small farm in Illinois, but the average size of a farm, you would not qualify based on the assets, just your equipment, your buildings, and what your land is worth under Illinois’s current state tax. I mean, the feds got twelve million dollars as your point of demarcation. In Illinois, it’s four million. We’ve been trying to fight it to get it to the federal level, and we’d even take smaller bites at that if we could."

He said there are tools and education available but still much work left to do to in the way of aligning federally.

"The interesting part about the four million is if you are one dollar over it, it goes all the way back to zero. So there’s a lot of work in Illinois to work on the estate tax. I’ve got a personal story that deals with our farm and our family farm when my grandfather died. We ended up losing half of the farm because of estate taxes. In our small business interact communities, if you built something, there can be a hook on it somewhere. But right now, you’re taking away what you worked your whole life for, or your father did, or your grandfather did. We paid for the assets in our farm over those generations, yet in one fell swoop.

Now there’s tools that farmers can use and educational. I’ve talked to Farm Bureau about this, educating our farmers as to what tools are available right now, but it’s just in just right now that we are so not aligned with the federal government."

Joyce added there are many things in the state aligned and mis-aligned, but this legislation is particularly detrimental to the farming and small business community.