Estate Tax: Wait For the Lame Duck?

From Tom Herman's tax column in the Sunday Journal:

Q: What is your gut feeling on what is going to happen to the estate-tax law for 2011?

—S.M., Yorba Linda, Calif.

A: The murky outlook for the estate tax has grown even more murky lately.

The situation reminds me of an old Washington quip: On the surface, very little is happening. But beneath the surface, nothing is happening.

Herman thinks the federal estate tax might be revived at year end, in a lame-duck session of Congress. Then again, maybe not.