Inheritance Tax.

Editor,

An inheritance tax, levied on cash that is passed from one generation to the next, was cynically marketed in your pages yesterday as an "egalitarian" solution to the "debate" over the estate tax. The dead give-away that an inheritance tax is anything but egalitarian is that it was presented as the antithesis of "class warfare," which is supposedly fueled by "resentment" of the rich.

The average worker will leave his offspring an IRA in the amount of $34,000 and a fully leveraged house. Contrary to the argument for an inheritance tax, a billionaire will not leave millions of dollars, as a lump sum payment, to an heir. The billionaire's assets will be "owned" by a third party, a trust, and that ownership will not change upon the billionaire's demise. Proceeds from that trust, unearned income -- upon which taxes are headed straight to zero under the economic theory that is currently in vogue, will be assigned to the heir.

So an inheritance tax becomes one more weapon in the very real war that is being waged world-wide by the rich against the working class, because the heirs of the rich would not pay any tax according to its terms, but workers' offspring would have their pockets picked of the pittance their parents were able to squirrel away for them in life.