Dozens of the Wealthy Join to Fight Estate Tax Repeal by David Kay Johnston
SEATTLE, Feb. 13 — Some 120 wealthy Americans, including Warren E. Buffett, George Soros and the father of William H. Gates, are urging Congress not to repeal taxes on estates and gifts.
[Among those signing it are Mr. Soros, the billionaire financier; the philanthropist David Rockefeller Jr., former chairman of Rockefeller & Company; Steven C. Rockefeller, chairman of the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation; Agnes Gund, a philanthropist whose family owns stakes in many companies, and Ben Cohen, a founder of Ben & Jerry’s.]
President Bush has proposed phasing out those taxes by 2009. But a petition drive being organized here by Mr. Gates’s father, William H. Gates Sr., argues that “repealing the estate tax would enrich the heirs of America’s millionaires and billionaires while hurting families who struggle to make ends meet.”
The billions of dollars in government revenue lost “will inevitably be made up either by increasing taxes on those less able to pay or by cutting Social Security, Medicare, environmental protection and many other government programs so important to our nation’s continued well-being,” the petition says.
In addition to the loss of government revenue, the petition says, repeal would harm charities, to which many of the affluent make contributions as a way of reducing the size of their estates.
“The estate tax,” it says, “exerts a powerful and positive effect on charitable giving. Repeal would have a devastating impact on public charities.” …
Mr. Buffett said repealing the estate tax “would be a terrible mistake,” the equivalent of “choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the eldest sons of the gold-medal winners in the 2000 Olympics.” …
“We have come closer to a true meritocracy than anywhere else around the world,” he said. “You have mobility so people with talents can be put to the best use. Without the estate tax, you in effect will have an aristocracy of wealth, which means you pass down the ability to command the resources of the nation based on heredity rather than merit.”