Death Tax? Double Tax? For Most, It's No Tax

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON

WHEN Congress comes back from its summer recess, one of the first things Senate Republicans will try to do, again, is kill the estate tax.

Perhaps no other tax has so many passionate, persevering and politically organized opponents as the estate tax, or "death tax," as they have branded it.

As Michael J. Graetz and Ian Shapiro of Yale recount in "Death by a Thousand Cuts" (Princeton University Press), their entertaining account of the repeal movement, opponents of the estate tax have already achieved a remarkable political feat by building broad public support for abolishing a tax that currently affects only 2 percent of all estates.

But repeal would be costly - more than $70 billion a year, once it was complete - and many of the populist arguments in favor of repeal are misleading. If estate or inheritance taxes were frozen at today's levels, they would have almost no impact on family farmers and most small-business owners.