In 1889, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie offered up a rousing and still-famous defense of the estate tax:
Of all forms of taxation, this seems the wisest. Men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives, the proper use of which for public ends would work good to the community, should be made to feel that the community, in the form of the state, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share. By taxing estates heavily at death the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire's unworthy life.
It's still possible to find very rich people espousing similar views. Third-richest-person-in-the-world Warren Buffett was espousing them on television just Tuesday morning. But with yet another Republican administration proposing yet another repeal of the tax (the last repeal was enacted in 2001, took full effect in 2010 and expired in 2011), and public sentiment seemingly in favor of such a move, it's worth considering just what has happened to change people's minds since 1889.
(Related: Tax Reform Is Coming. But First …)
When Carnegie made his argument, he had the political wind at his back. Over the next 15 years, 24 states (out of 45) enacted broad inheritance taxes, and the Republican-dominated federal government temporarily used a 15% estate levy (it was enacted in 1898 and repealed in 1902) to finance the Spanish-American War and other military adventures. At least part of the political support for the estate tax in those days may have stemmed from a desire to stave off a federal income tax, University of California at Santa Barbara historian W. Elliot Brownlee writes in his "Federal Taxation in America: A Short History." But it's striking to see the words that a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, wielded in support of both estate and income taxes in 1906:
The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the State, because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.
The estate tax finally came to stay in 1916, after the Democratic Woodrow Wilson administration had already succeeded (in 1913) in getting a federal income tax approved. With American intervention in World War I looming, Wilson wanted money for big-time increases in military spending, and adding an estate tax was actually less controversial than expanding the income tax. And so it remained for many, many decades.
Then … something changed. In a fascinating 2003 paper, political scientists Mayling Birney and Ian Shapiro date the beginning of the anti-estate-tax movement to a 1992 bill sponsored by prominent House Democrats Richard Gephardt and Henry Waxman that would have increased the number of families facing the tax.
That brought a "strong and entirely unexpected backlash," initially led by an estate planner from Orange County, California, that within a few years had developed into a repeal movement with bipartisan backing. Public opinion turned out, when pollsters first started asking about the issue in the late 1990s, to lean against the estate tax, with poll respondents continuing to view it negatively even when informed that it affected at most the wealthiest 2% of the population. It was not a high priority for most voters, and when pollsters asked about estate tax reform versus repeal, most respondents favored the former.
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