It is so also with "death duties." It is reassuring that although only 2 percent of estates pay any death duties, 60 percent of Americans favor continuing reforms of the kind adumbrated by the bill passed two years ago, which, however, is programmed to terminate in 10 years.
Here the devil-words are: Only the rich stand to benefit. The reason President Bush is nevertheless intending to persist in death-duty reforms is that there is an intuitive notion out among the public that it's wrong (wrong is different from not a good idea) to tax already taxed gains. But argument for total relief suffers, again, from the extremity of the paradigm. The same problem inheres in the flat tax. The French call it a "fausse idee claire" -- taxing everyone by the same percentage of their income is a terrific idea, but you are still left with the problem of welfare for those who cannot provide for their own.
Another reform? The elimination of any capital-gains tax. What we are hearing now is something that goes part way -- a reduction in the tax from the present level. To call for an end to it plays into the hands of those dragons who come snarling to life at any mention of privatizing Social Security, ending the capital-gains tax, and eliminating its progressive feature.
Years ago a social philosopher wrote that modern politics has become the substituting of political for economic means of acquiring wealth. That is so, and the consequences of it necessarily impinge on President Bush when he lays out his economic reforms. Those who believe in true equality, which of course denies different rates of taxation for different scales of earning, have to wince, and, for relief, direct our eyes back to the heavens, unsullied by the dross of politics.