Estates and fairness

Though the idea has attracted a lot more Democrats than Republicans, a petition from some of the nation’s wealthiest families to keep the estate tax is more than partisan noise. It makes important points, and rather than rush through the president’s proposal to do away with the tax, Congress should listen to the concerns of the petitioners.

Among the 120 people who have signed up so far are George Soros, Warren Buffett, David Rockefeller Jr., Steven C. Rockefeller and Agnes Gund, all worth either billions or hundreds of millions of dollars. William H. Gates Sr., the father of Bill Gates, began the petition. Its primary point is that repealing the estate tax will benefit the heirs of millionaires and billionaires while shifting more of the tax burden onto middle-class families or by cutting programs such as Social Security and Medicare. As compelling is their point that, with the president’s emphasis on private charities doing more to help the needy, the last thing Congress should do is take away an incentive to give.

The estate tax provides that incentive by giving the wealthy a choice of giving to their favorite charity or having a sizable portion of it go to the government. Take away the incentive and the charities will suffer. President Bush’s director of the new White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, John DiIulio Jr, made the same point last week. Mr. Buffett, commenting on the influence of wealth in preventing a society based on wealth instead of merit, was even more blunt. He recently told the New York Times that repealing the estate tax would invite power by primogeniture, the equivalent of “choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the eldest sons of the gold-medal winners in the 2000 Olympics.”

Congress has been arguing for more than a year about how to modify the estate tax. Those calling for its repeal first based their argument on helping farm families and small-business owners pass along businesses to their children without crippling taxes. It was a compelling argument until it turned out that, for 1998, only about 1,400 such businesses of the 47,500 filing returns for that year would have been affected by the estate tax and nearly every one of those would have been equally helped by raising the qualifying line to $3 million in assets. Congress killed legislation that would have, in fact, raised the line to $4 million. The estates of 98 percent of all Americans fall below the level required to be affected by the tax.

That isn’t to say the estate tax should escape reform, just that in the debate over tax reductions, there may be tax cuts that more fairly apportion savings and have a greater, more immediate effect on the economy. A cut in payroll taxes has been suggested as accomplishing both those goals. Some of the very wealthiest Americans, at least, don’t think their estates should be first in line for relief.