Estate Tax repeal violates American Values

From toh Blog Altercations:
The evil of estate tax repeal
Nordic dream, American
• June 5, 2006 12:26 PM ET Permalink
Remember the "American Dream?" I used to believe in it too. Turns out we were all being naïve—at least insofar as the last half century is concerned. Why am I writing about this today? Because Congress is readying itself to make everything worse by repealing the estate tax.
Consider what you'd have learned if you'd read the (conservative) Economist magazine last week:
I'm afraid, that the "Nordic Dream"—or even the "British Dream" is a more realistic one than the much cherished "American Dream. This is true at nearly every level of society. Overall, according to two separate studies based on a set of data collected beginning in the 1950s, Nordic countries score around 0.2 for sons, Britain scores 0.36, and America 0.54 (meaning that a son's earnings are more closely related to his father's in America, and almost not at all in the Nordic nations). But it is at the bottom rung where the failure of the American system is most profoundly apparent. In the Nordic nations, for instance, three-quarters of those on welfare had moved up and out of the system by the time they reached in their forties but barely more than half of their American counterparts had. As the editors of the conservative Economist magazine put it, "In other words, Nordic countries have almost completely snapped the link between the earnings of parents and children at and near the bottom. That is not at all true of America." In Britain, too, fully seventy percent of those enmeshed in the welfare system had moved out within a single generation, again—a higher percentage than in America. The magazine points to the generous tax and welfare provisions for families as "The obvious explanation for greater mobility in the Nordic countries… which (especially when compared with America's) deliberately try to help the children of the poor to do better than their parents. [i]

Now take a look at what I learned from The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,
Estate tax repeal will likely cost $1 trillion in the first decade alone, and compare that amount to other priorities. For example, in light of the controversy this week over cuts in homeland security funding for a number of communities, it is worth noting that the annual revenue loss from repealing the estate tax is roughly the same as total federal spending on homeland security nationwide.