Farmers!
One of the NYTimes' eidtorials from Saturday is a good reminder about what's at stake with rescinding the estate tax, which has been re-framed by anti-tax folks as the Death Tax and continually uses the sad story of the deceased family farmer whose family, upon inheriting the family farm, can't make the estate tax payments:

In the arguments about taxes on inheritance, no one tugs at the national heartstrings more urgently than the family farmer. Anti-tax forces and big family businesses like to conjure up a field of dreams' turning into condos - a young family inherits their birthright and then has to sell it to pay the taxes. That all-American nightmare turns out to be mostly myth. If Congress and the White House repeal the estate taxes for the very rich, family farmers largely won't benefit, and some may actually owe more tax. Meanwhile, the deficit will grow by almost $70 billion a year, and the rest of us will have to make up the difference. Most family farmers already avoid much if not all of the tax on estates. A new report from the Congressional Budget Office has found that "exceedingly few" farms are expected to face the tax in the next four years. Since Congress has increased the deduction for estates and the tax is on the net value, the number of estates that will owe taxes has dropped by 82 percent, the budget office calculated. And that does not count the farmers who create trusts or other ways to pass along their assets by paying far less of the estate tax. The tax on estates now exempts the first $1.5 million in assets, and even more for most farms. Last year that tax raised an estimated $23.4 billion. That's a lot of armor for the troops in Iraq. That's a lot of teachers to reduce class sizes in urban schools. That's a lot of extra security for chemical plants or ports or subways. If the president and the Republican majority in Congress wipe out the estate tax altogether, that money will go instead to a lot of extremely wealthy people. If Congress does that, it may force farms and small business to pay even larger tax bills. John Buckley, the chief tax lawyer for the Democrats at the House Ways and Means Committee, wrote in Tax Notes magazine that these family-farm and business estates might have to pay substantial capital gains taxes instead on properties that might have been purchased many decades ago. Steadily raising exemptions and taxing the remainder of an estate at a rate of at least 45 percent is a better solution. As a farmer in Iowa said a few years ago, the "death tax" is not a tax on death. It is a tax on estates of $1.5 million or much more.