Friday, September 3, 1999

     After 83 years of confiscatory life, the estate tax needs to come to a timely death. This bane of the frugal and enterprising still haunts families and wrecks businesses.

     It is the most notorious example of double-dipping on the tax record. It turns honest people into guilt-ridden tax evaders. It costs moderately wealthy and wealthy couples thousands of dollars a.year in attorneys' fees to figure out convoluted means for legally circumventing the IRS death windfall.

     As our story last week illustrates ("Cut in estate tax expected to pass, page 15), this World War I bill for bilking the rich has become one of the major reasons for the crash and burn of family companies -- 70% of which do not last through the second generation, and 87% of which end before the third generation has passed.

     How many tens of thousands of families have woeful tales of estate auctions forced upon them by federal and state tallies of property value that the families could relieve only by selling businesses and other real property?

     How many more such families, in this economic boom, have now become "rich" and new targets of this outright government theft of achievement?

     It is, after all, achievement that our governments punish; it is the entrepreneur and those who invest and manage well who are the main economic engines of free enterprise in a free country.

     In passing its tax-cut package last month, Congress actually committed a brave act by seeking to extinguish the estate tax. President Clinton has, however, vowed to veto the package.

     Let these officials know what you think. With a budget surplus expected again this year, the time is right for encouraging these officials to act on principle, to do the right thing: to honor the innovators, the frugal, the wise, the hard-working.

     Let's get the government out of the death-profit business and let families fearlessly take up the business and financial mantle of their deceased loved ones.