The most recent poll I have was done by Harris in March and shows 68 percent of Americans favoring elimination of the estate tax. In every poll I have seen since 2000, roughly two-thirds of respondents say the same thing—far more than can possibly be accounted for just by those who think they will benefit.

The oldest poll I have was taken in 1935 in the middle of the Great Depression when Franklin D. Roosevelt was actively pushing soak-the-rich tax policies. Nevertheless, 52 percent of Americans said that there should be no limit on how much a person should be allowed to inherit—in effect supporting the idea of no estate tax.

Supporters of the estate tax have never had a good response for these poll results. In my view, there are only two possible answers. One is that people just believe that the estate tax is fundamentally unfair—people pay taxes on their savings and income while they are alive and there is simply no justification for an additional tax at death. Second is a widespread belief, whether realistic or not, that perhaps they or their children may someday become rich and potentially lose more than half their assets to Uncle Sam when they die.

Finally, I often hear that repeal of the estate tax is unnecessary because proper estate planning can reduce or even eliminate it no matter how rich one is. On June 12, one estate tax supporter had a letter in the New York Times saying that the tax was basically optional. “So repeal is unnecessary except for the uninformed, the unfocused or those people who are unwilling to pay their financial planning team a little more to make the tax go away or be reduced,” he wrote.

This has to be the worst defense of any tax I have ever heard. When a tax is arbitrary and falls on mainly on the ignorant while the sophisticated are exempted, this is usually an excellent argument for getting rid of that tax. In my opinion, estate tax supporters have a lot of nerve turning a fatal flaw in that tax into a prime virtue.