It reduces SS funding - the money being used now to pay current recipients.

It presumably reduces the eventual benefit the exempt employee will receive when he or she is SS-eligible.

While I suppose it increases the hiring of those who have been unemployed the longest, what will prevent employers from letting current employees go in order to hire SS-exempt workers at possibly lower wages and provide them with lower benefits?

The estate and gift tax issue is a mess, and not just on the federal side.  No one has considered that the disappearance of the tax is accompanied by rules that require beneficiaries to assume the decedent's cost basis in the assets they inherit.  In other words, no step-up in basis to value at death; the cost basis of the house Mom and Dad bought in 1950 for $15,000, and improved with another $15,000, is the beneficiaries' basis - not the current $300,000 - so if it gets sold for $350,000, the taxable gain to the beneficiary is $320,000.  And there's no guarantee that the beneficiaries are at the same "rich" level as those who are leaving significant assets to their heirs.

Does anyone know who put these two things in the jobs bill?