Changes to the country’s tax policies are usually lobbyist-lubricated landgrabs for special interests, either buried in impenetrably dense legislation or (if the measure is too widely followed to hide) cloaked in soaring rhetoric leavened with some think-tank econobabble. The passion for this tax-code pork is one of our politicians’ few unifying attributes—liberals, conservatives, denizens of red states and blue can all barely pull their snouts from the trough long enough to castigate their fellows for being too visibly rapacious.
 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.
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