Heiristocracy: how the GOP got away with cutting the estate tax.

• Author: Franklin, Daniel
• Position: Book by Michael J. Graetz and Ian Shapiro - Book Review

Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth By Michael J. Graetz and Ian Shapiro Princeton University Press, $29.95

To the Democratic mind, there is no tax more just, more moral, more American, than the estate tax. If we must tax someone, who better than those fortunate few who have gobs of money and did nothing to earn it; the children of the wealthy? Every dollar taken from the ranks of Bergdorf blondes is a dollar that need not be taken from working Americans. And so that poor, beleaguered Democratic mind could be excused if it falls into a sputtering, senseless rage with the recognition that Republicans have turned eliminating a levy on the luckiest and least worthy into a legitimate populist movement.

How a populist movement arose to eliminate the most populist of taxes is a political mystery without parallel. Not since World War I has a progressive tax been excised altogether, and yet four years after President Bush signed a phase-out of the estate tax, he has yet to reap a word of backlash. Tempting as it is for Democrats to chalk up their loss on the estate tax to Republican lies or sleight of hand tricks like renaming it "the Death Tax," Death by A Thousand Cuts, by Yale political scientists Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro, demonstrates that the story is far more complicated.

No doubt, the estate tax debate is riddled with misinformation and misperception. But the phony facts mask a fundamental and far-reaching change in how Americans look at the morality of taxation, one upon which Democrats appear to be on the losing side. Democratic leaders comfort themselves by saying, if people only knew the facts. But "the Democrats' failure," the authors write, "goes to the very core of their approach to convincing the American public that they are right about two of the most fundamental questions in any system of government: how and why the country should tax its citizens."

For all the book's many virtues, thrills are not among them. Those looking for a page-turner that captures the excitement of the legislative process should look elsewhere (and let me know when they find it). Instead, the book reads like a narrative of how termites ate your house. Out of sight and unopposed, the advocates of repeal just munched and munched and munched until support for the tax caved in like a corroded joist.

The story begins in the late '80s, as liberals would expect, with a few rich folks who wanted to keep more of their money. A key early figure in the movement was...