NY Times article, by David Kocieniewski, reports on the divide over estate tax reform

On June 11, 2010, the New York Times published What an Estate Looks Like to the Taxman, by David Kocieniewski. 

Kocieniewski reports on the divide over estate tax reform, and provides a balanced summary of the positions for and against the estate tax.

Kocieniewski asks interesting questions:

The estate tax is one of those hyper-combustible issues where emotion, and shrewd lobbying, can loose an outsize uproar. . . .

What is the dividing line between wealthy and upper middle class? Or between someone who owns an estate and someone lucky enough to have bought a home decades ago and watched its value grow to seven figures? . . .

Mr. Buffett warned Congress in 2007 that without an estate tax, the United States runs the risk of becoming a “dynastic plutocracy.”

But where does that dynastic plutocracy begin? There is an astronomical gap between Mr. Buffett’s fortune, which Forbes estimated at $47 billion, and two retirees in Marin County, California, whose life’s work might have allowed them to leave their heirs $3.5 million in assets, mostly in the value of a house.