“Death tax” is not actually my term; that’s the phrase the anti-tax spinmeisters came up with. It’s called the estate tax. At its peak, it was a 49 percent tax levied on any estate starting at dollar two million and one. In other words, the first $2 million of any estate is not subject to the tax at all. That alone means that 99 percent of taxpayers never pay a dime. And if your estate has a value of $3 million, your tax rate is actually 16.33 percent. That’s less than the top rate on income taxes.

We’re a nation teetering on the brink of fiscal crisis. Finding money for Pell Grants and to support institutions of higher learning is going to be difficult, no matter how much economic sense such investments make. The unsound tax cuts of the Bush administration and its friends in Congress are one major reason for this. Allowing the estate tax to phase back in is the most obvious and fair way to start to rectify this problem.

An important benefit of the tax is that it would include a credit for payments of state-level estate taxes (say that six times fast). So if Michigan charges an additional tax to the $3 million estate discussed above, it would come out of the 16.33 percent paid to the federal government. One of the advantages of this policy is that it prevents states from competing to be the cheapest state to die in. And it ensures a stable and fair source of revenue. Naturally, Congress and the administration did away with this even faster than they did the federal portion of the tax.

When the feds wiped out this part of the estate tax, it put a lot of states in a bind because it had the effect of wiping out many states’ own estate taxes. In Washington state, the Legislature took action to restore this revenue. The restoration was designed to affect about 200 of the 45,000 people who die each year in Washington. This fall a group of wealthy individuals, including a scion of the Nordstrom family, organized to place an anti-estate tax referendum on the November ballot. The savings it would give these wealthy individuals would have taken money directly out of the Education Legacy Trust, the state’s funding source for student financial aid, among other things.

A coalition of progressive organizations including AFT Washington, led by president Sandra Schroeder, took on these fat cats. They worked diligently to arm voters with the information they would need to vote sensibly for their own interests and those of their children. In the end, voters decided to keep the estate tax. For those worrying about taking on this fight in the nation’s capital, the example of Washington state should give hope.