In an age in which political discourse often has all the substance of a bumper sticker, it was not surprising that a complex income tax situation, born of the influx of women into the workplace during World War II, aggravated by the widowhood of many and made even worse by the ascent of the two-paycheck family, came to be known simply as the “marriage tax.” The implication, of course, was that anyone not sufficiently gung-ho for immediate repeal was anti-marriage.

Luckily, huge budget surpluses will allow Congress to eliminate the problem by throwing money at it — no consideration need be given to the fact that for every couple hit with a marriage penalty, another enjoys a marriage benefit. Now, it’s on to the “death tax.”

Senate Republican leaders assert that the federal estate tax is expressly designed to add to the grief of those who have recently lost a beloved family member and that those even asking guestions about its repeal are grave robbers. “The idea that the federal government would reach into the grave and pull back half of a life’s work offends people,” is how Majority Leader Trent Lott puts it.

Nothing, other than the thought process behind that assertion, is ever that simple, yet the GOP campaign to scrap the estate tax is based on a cartoonish image of the Grim Reaper (bearing an uncanny resemblance to a liberal Democrat) prying open the casket to rifle the pockets of the dearly departed. The sole intent of this diabolical activity is the ruination of the family farm and the family-run business.

Simply untrue. Individuals can pass on $675,000 tax free to heirs; couples $1.35 million. Farms and family-owned businesses get a further exemption allowing the tax-free transfer of up to $2.6 million in assets. The estate tax affects only 48,000 of the 2.5 million Americans who die each year (less than 2 percent) and not even 2,000 of the affected estates are farms and family businesses (less thyan one-tenth of 1 percent). Three-fourths of this $50-billion a year windfall would go to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, heirs to estates that grew fat from favorable capital gains tax rates and generous rules that allow the liability of deferred capital gains taxes to be cancelled at death.

The marriage tax was easy — the money was there to make it go away. Total repeal of the estate tax won’t be — the money isn’t there and an offsetting tax increase will be necessary as more and more baby boomers approach retirement. If Congress wants tax cuts that allow entrepreneurs to pass along the fruits of their risk-taking and hard work, to preserve family farms and businesses, it can do so. It will just take more than a bumper sticker this time.