Congress is voting this week on whether to repeal the estate tax. The step would be a huge boon to billionaires and others whose fortunes would forever escape taxation, creating an even larger dynastic class of inheritors who owe their riches to their skill at picking their parents.

But that’s not what was heard at a House Ways and Means Committee hearing last week. Instead the theme was how the tax was eviscerating American farmers.

This plan has no chance of becoming law while President Barack Obama is in office, but it has some Democrats running scared instead of standing on their principles. Some of them are talking about exempting farmers from the estate tax.

On the basis of the hearing, it’s hard to imagine why any people would want to farm or run their own business — that is, if you assume the hearing was grounded in reality.

The fact is that any claim that the estate tax is killing family farms is a lie.

How many of America’s 2.2 million farms have been sold to pay estate taxes? None.

Committee Republicans tried to explain away that inconvenient fact by saying that the estate tax forces farmers to set aside so much money to pay it that it interferes with their operations. Their rhetoric was as long as the facts were short.

Some committee members asserted that the estate tax forces heirs to sell farmland to pay estate taxes, resulting in smaller and less efficient operations. But the only example cited by a witness dated to the late 1990s, when the amount of wealth exempt from the estate tax was about a tenth of what it is today. That farm exists in an urban setting — meaning its continued operation is not the highest and best use of that land.

Estate tax or no, farmers have always sold out in urban areas and moved to less costly land — a lesson I learned in the 1950s growing up on an orange ranch in Orange, California. Hundreds of acres of orchards where my pals and I built forts with orange crates, re-enacted World War II and camped out on summer nights were bulldozed, the huge piles of trees set ablaze to make way for suburban houses.

The Ways and Means hearing came 14 years after I hunted for farms that had been lost because of the estate tax. President George W. Bush wanted to repeal the estate tax entirely, and to advance that cause he repeatedly said it was destroying family farms.

But the Bush White House could not point me to a single example, nor could the American Farm Bureau or other organizations I contacted.

Harlyn Riekena and two dozen other central Iowa farmers — every one a Republican — told me they favored increasing the estate tax exemption, then about $1.3 million for a married couple, but not the repeal proposed by Bush and other party leaders, which they saw as a favor to Wall Street.

When I met with the Marshall County board of supervisors, all of them farmers, they laughed out loud when asked if we needed estate tax repeal to save family farms. In salty language, one supervisor said he was surprised at the gullibility of network television journalists whose reports lacked any skepticism about Bush’s statements.

Professor Neil Harl, an Iowa State University economist whose tax advice has made him well known among Midwest farmers, said for 35 years he searched without finding one family farm lost to the estate tax.

“It’s a myth,” he said.