Pat Toomey, leading his Democrat challenger Joe Sestak by 7 percent according to the latest Muhlenberg College poll, has signed a pledge to repeal the estate tax if elected as Pennsylvania’s next senator. In remarks at Herre Brothers, Inc. in eastern Pennsylvania, Toomey called the estate tax “terribly unfair and counterproductive.”

“Fundamentally the death tax is about jobs,” said Toomey. “It prevents us from having as many jobs as we could have, and it makes it much more difficult to have the economy recovery that we should be having.”

Toomey outlined a few reasons he opposed the tax, which he noted is “actually quite poor as a revenue producer for the federal government.”

“For every dollar that the Treasury takes in from death taxes,” said Toomey, “considerably more than that dollar is spent in dealing with attorneys fees, and accountants, and the various insurance policies.” Toomey’s other arguments:

Businesses get destroyed entirely because they have to be liquidated in order to pay the death tax. Jobs are lost even among those businesses that aren’t themselves destroyed, but sometimes have to take on a massive amount of debt in order to pay the death tax, and that borrowing and the interest expense from servicing that debt prevents them from hiring new workers, expanding and creating the kind of jobs they would otherwise create. Then there are the enormous insurance premiums that people pay so that insurance will be there upon occasion of their death.

Toomey’s remarks begin at 9:40 into the video below. He also hits on the impact of the death tax on Pennsylvania family farms, beginning at 13:00.