WSJ today:
"Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the Obama administration will allow tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans to expire on schedule"
Mr. Geithner said the White House will allow taxes on top earners to increase on Jan. 1, 2011, as part of an effort to help bring down the mounting budget deficit. He said the White House still plans to extend tax cuts for middle- and lower-income Americans and expects to undertake a broader tax overhaul next year.
It's not clear - no mention of a specific bill in the article - how exactly the administration plans to engineer this feat.
If no new law is passed, a huge swath of the tax cuts - all brackets, etc - will expire. In order for the tax cuts to expire on only the wealthiest, a new law will have to be passed which specifies that - which says "extend them on these folks, but not on those folks". And it's not clear how Congress will deal with that. Some democrats are now arguing for extending *all* the cuts.
Regarding the estate tax, by the way, Sen. Jim DeMint (R) tried to attach a proposal to kill the estate tax (I haven't read the details, but presumably, it would have simply been an extension of the 2010 status of the estate tax) to the unemployment extension bill. DeMint's proposal to attach it was defeated.
Meanwhile, there are still two additional estate tax measures pending in the Senate. A bipartisan bill which would reset it to 35% on estates over $5million; and another bill proposed by Bernie Sanders which exempts the first $3.5 million and then has a progressive structure above that (up to 50% at $50million, plus an additional 15% "surtax" on billionaires).
I don't remember hearing where the administration stands on either of those proposals, but I suspect that whichever, if either, passes through Congress, Obama would sign it (assuming folks don't go and tack a zillion other things onto it).
Anyway, Estate planning is still a big old mess right now, and general income-tax planning for the next year or so is, perhaps a little less messy, but certainly far from settled so far.