Ray Madoff

Pretend you did.

Before you were born, there was, in the early 1990s, a campaign funded by 18 of the country's richest families.

And that campaign was designed to turn the public against the estate tax.

They sought estate tax repeal.

And George W. Bush was a big carrier of the banner.

And their most effective thing that they did was they hired this guy by the name of Frank Luntz, who was a communications expert.

And he said, never call it the estate tax because that sounds like something that's for rich people.

Instead, call it the death tax.

And we'll bring this campaign and we'll say it's unfair and it's a double tax and it hurts family farms and businesses.

And we're going to run this campaign.

And this campaign was extraordinarily effective, not for their goal that they sought to achieve, which was actual get rid of the estate tax from the books.

But it was successful in a way that was ultimately even, I'll argue, more successful, which is what they did is they were so successful in their campaign to make people feel uncomfortable with this idea of the estate tax.

that Congress stopped doing its job in terms of closing loopholes.

Indeed, the last time that Congress has closed a single loophole was in 1990, 36 years ago.

And so as a result, over the past 36 years, there has been a proliferation of tax avoidance techniques that have been allowed to occur.

They all have this sort of Dr. Seuss-sounding names,

crats and cruts, clats and cluts, grats and gruts, Q-perts, Q-tips, Q-dots, the whole panoply of them.

And as all of these exclusions have developed, the estate tax has been completely corroded, so it no longer does anything.

Not because the exemption is too big, which it is big, it's $15 million and it used to be $1 million, but because of all of these things

that take these transfers out altogether.