Entry 2:

Pete du Pont is a former governor of Delaware and policy chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. He writes a columneach Wednesday  for the Wall Street Journal's Opinionjournal.com. William H. Gates Sr. is a co-chairman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Dear Mr. Gates,

Your arguments against the repeal of the death tax seem flawed on several counts and fail to address the most important issue of all, the unfairness of the tax. The arguments you make are those of a big government exemplar; you oppose actions that reduce revenues or alter the government status quo.

The cost in revenues to governments, federal and state, is your first argument. We have a $5.6 trillion surplus, and yet the $28 billion you say repeal of death taxes would have cost in 1999—just one-half of 1 percent of the surplus—is of primary concern to you. So much so that you suggest we might have to cut Social Security or Medicare to make up the difference. It's a dead horse, Mr. Gates (see my current Opinionjournal.com column for some other dead horses). Our government is not suffering from a lack of resources. Threatening dire consequences to major programs because of minor revenue reductions does not add credence to your argument.

Adding insult to injury, you impugn the character of thousands of donors to charitable causes whom you believe give because they are greedy for the tax deduction. Death tax repeal would "devastate nonprofits" you say, as if all of us give to the United Way, universities, museums, and our places of worship only because of the tax deduction. You underrate the American people, Mr. Gates. Can you seriously contend that people give to Planned Parenthood or the Sierra Club for the tax deduction? The argument also defies logic, contending the more money people have the less they will give to charity. I would bet the opposite would be true.

As for death taxes "affect[ing] only the wealthiest 2%," that is simply not so. According to Treasury Department estimates, some 47,000 deceased people paid some death tax last year, 40,000 of whom had estates of $2.5 million or less. The National Development Council cites the example of a 20-year-old who saved and invested $1,000 each year until he was 65. He will then have as much as $850,000 in financial assets and will owe death taxes if he dies the next day. Why do you believe it is fair to tax him? Or a $2,000-a-year saver who will have a million and a half dollars at death?

But these people are not the only ones affected. Tens of millions of Americans employ accountants and attorneys to avoid paying the death tax. That is the number affected, and the cost to them and the economy is large. A study by the National Association of Business Owners found that the average female entrepreneur spent $60,000 on death tax planning. Family businesses in Upstate New York were found to have spent $125,000 each. Multiply that by hundreds of thousands of businesses and people, and you see the negative impact of the death tax on the nation. There are billions of dollars simply wasted on legal stratagems that could better be invested in our economy or given to charity.

But your final argument is the crux of it: Death taxes must be used to prevent too many people from accumulating too much money and establishing a "dangerous, permanent aristocracy" in America. It's a 1930s argument, but if you believe it you should be advocating a massive expansion of death taxes; the fact that so few are paying them must be a clear and present danger to the Republic. Only 374 people with estates over $20 million paid the tax last year. Between the ball players, tobacco lawyers, Hollywood actresses and producers, and the dot-com billionaires (well, maybe there are fewer of them just now) there must be thousands and thousands with that much money. Shouldn't the tax be expanded to get them all?

My view is very different: I believe the death tax should be repealed because it is unfair. Fairness matters in America, and a great many people see the confiscation of 55 percent of whatever is left after you have paid your taxes all your life to be unfair and wrong. As Martin Feldstein has calculated, a 50-year-old who earns an extra $1,000, invests it in a 7 percent bond, and dies at 80 will have paid income and capital gains taxes that reduce its value to his children by 65 percent. On top of that, Mr. Gates, you want to seize up to 55 percent of the remainder when the wage earner dies.

It makes no sense, except as you point out, as an attack on wealth.

But it is not a very effective attack on wealth since the wealthy rarely pay the tax. The death tax was designed as a symbolic gesture, to be paid by the 46 millionaires whom FDR thought "necessary to throw to the wolves" to prevent Huey Long from enacting something even worse. It is structured so that avoiding its payment is easily done if one has the cash to pay the lawyers. And it brings almost no revenue to the Treasury.

So, the death tax is fiscally useless, in practice non-functional, and unfair. It exists by virtue of two pillars of liberal thought: It is a tax, and that is good; and it is aimed at the wealthy, and that is better. It may be aimed at the wealthy, but it is hitting the middle class unfairly and penalizing the entrepreneurial spirit. It is time for it to go.