But there is one small corner of the tax reform debate in which some very powerful individuals are not voraciously pursuing their own self interest—the estate tax. Many of the people who are most exposed to this levy have stepped forward to lobby for keeping it. Responsible Wealth, a group that opposes its elimination, lists 2,171 individuals on its website who have signed a petition in support of the estate tax. The list makes for interesting reading. The presence of some signatories (John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Newman, Ted Turner and Ben & Jerry’s cofounder Ben Cohn, for example) is not a total surprise. Others, such as George Soros, Steven Rockefeller and David Rockefeller Jr., Julian Robertson and Jerome Kohlberg, lend the list, and the debate, more complexity.

Advocates for eliminating the tax argue that it is prima facie unfair, that it destroys family businesses and farms, that it causes spendthrift behavior on the part of wealth creators, and that the costs of complying with it, or avoiding it through complex estate planning schemes, are a substantial burden. Research by the University of Michigan Business School supports some of these claims. Analysts there found a correlation over time between the size of estates and the estate tax rate, suggesting that high estate taxes prompt wealth creators to either spend down their assets during their lifetime or go to expensive lengths to keep them out of their taxable estates.

Those who want the tax retained, including Responsible Wealth’s cofounders, Bill Gates Sr. and Chuck Collins, an heir to the Oscar Mayer fortune, believe, like Andrew Carnegie and Teddy Roosevelt before them, that the estate tax is a bulwark against the formation of an American aristocracy. They believe it can act to close the growing gap between rich and poor in this country. In this month’s issue (see “Class Conscious,” page 48), Collins argues that self-made millionaires are no such thing; that few would have succeeded without society’s investment in schools, government regulations and other public goods. The estate tax, he says, is one way to pay back this debt to society.

This debate is one of the few in recent memory where both sides have well-reasoned and compelling arguments in their favor.

The issue, if Collins’s camp is correct, bears directly on the type of society the United States will become over the course of this century. Setting aside one’s cynicism about tax reform long enough to engage the issues and weigh the alternatives may be difficult, but in this instance, it is worth it.

Dwight Cass
Editor-in-Chief