From riches to responsibility: Defending the estate tax

UU World: The Magazine of the Unitarian Universalist Association, Mar/Apr 2003 by French, Kimberly

But this e-mail out of the blue seemed a bit suspicious. He suspected a prankster at the UFE office-where a good sense of humor is a job requirement-was joshing him. As the story has evolved through many public retellings, Collins fired back: "Yeah, and I'm Minnie Mouse."

Turns out, it really was Bill Gates's dad, who is a founding partner of a Seattle business-law firm and now director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which funds projects to improve health in the developing world. And he couldn't have been more serious.

Like Collins, Gates considered the estate tax a moral issue and was deeply disturbed by the movement to repeal the tax-which President George W Bush had made a top domestic priority when he took office. Especially troubling to both men was that, while repeal of the tax was not popular in polls, no one was arguing why it should be preserved. "We are now living in a second Gilded Age," Collins says. "There is as great a disparity of wealth now as there was then. And we're about to eliminate the estate tax? It's totally the wrong way. It's the one check we have."

Once Gates got Collins on the phone, he asked, "What can we do?"

Collins, the organizer, didn't skip a beat: "Draft a public statement, get media coverage, testify before Congress, write letters, op-ed pieces."

Gates replied, "I'm game. Let's do it all."

From both coasts, they got to work. First on the agenda was the kind of event Collins has become known for: creating a news story that steals the limelight from the mainstream newsmakers, with a sound bite too good for editors to resist: Tax Our Estates,Wealthy Say-It's Only Fair.

On Valentine's Day 2001, UFE's Responsible Wealth released its Call to Preserve the Estate Tax, a petition that has been signed by more than 1,000 of the wealthiest people in the country and is still taking signatures. Newsweek called it the "billionaire backlash."

Unfortunately, most members of Congress had already pledged their votes. In June 2001, President Bush signed a bizarre compromise bill crafted to comply with congressional budget mandates.

As the law stands, the estate-tax percentage will be gradually reduced over the next ten years. Complete repeal will occur in one year only-2010. After that, the 2001 estate-tax rate will go back into effect. The tax's opponents have continued to introduce bills to make the repeal permanent, but none have passed.

Stimulating a lively debate over the estate tax is no easy task, Collins is the first to admit. Most people will never pay it nor receive any perceptible benefit from its repeal. Currently, the first $2 million of a couple's estate is exempt, so only the wealthiest 1.5 percent of the population will pay any estate tax.

Even more significantly, in the two years since the temporary repeal was passed, terrorism and threats of war have eclipsed coverage of the estate tax issue. Yet the repeal stands, and efforts to make it permanent continue. Permanent repeal, Collins argues, would threaten the very fabric of our democracy and of a society that holds equal opportunity as its ideal. [See page 44.]