Anyway, in the course of my reading I’ve come across some little-known facts about the estate tax (refresher: it’s an inheritance tax on extremely wealthy estates):

§ A recent state-by-state analysis of the impact of the estate tax finds less than one percent of all estates in the United States were subject to the tax (and just 0.6% in Minnesota, or 230 estates) in 2006. In other words, this is not a middle-class tax.

§ Andrew Carnegie, Teddy Roosevelt and even Herbert Hoover were strong supporters of the estate tax. To quote Carnegie: “The parent who leaves his son enormous wealth generally deadens the talents and energies of his son, and leads him to lead a less useful and less worthy life than he otherwise would.”

§ The Gallo brothers - the California winemakers - took a much different tack than Carnegie. In 1986, they successfully lobbied for their own exception to the estate tax, so they could pass on more than $80 million to their grandchildren, tax-free.

And finally, take a look at our recently published issue brief on the same subject, with Minnesota-specific statistics.