Heritage Foundation fellow William Beach first published research describing how the estate tax hurt family farms and businesses in the summer of 1995. Efforts by Heritage and the American Enterprise Institute, as well as a coalition of think tanks and advocacy groups known as the Working Group for Death Tax Repeal, relied on Beach’s anecdotes about its harmful effects on middle-class families. All of this resonated with politicians and, ultimately, the public.

Their efforts were effective, at least in part, because so little was done to oppose them. Ian Shapiro, the Sterling professor of political science at Yale, explores the role think tanks played in Death by a Thousand Cuts, a book he cowrote with Michael Graetz. "Largely on the Democratic side, most people thought the estate tax could never be repealed, and they didn’t take it seriously until it was pretty far along," Shapiro explains.

In 1997, the American Enterprise Institute’s Norman Ornstein wrote a USA Today article in which he warned Democrats to pay more attention to the issue. But the opposition failed to emerge until 2001, when a group that included Warren Buffett and Bill Gates Sr. began to mobilize. Gates was among those who purchased an ad in the New York Times arguing against the repeal. "We came to the judgment that their role was de minimis," Shapiro says. "They got in right at the end, and they didn’t put resources into it."

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