Estate Tax repeal effort bankrolled by just 18 families

It's been a pretty successful campaign so far. Terming it the 'Death Tax,' convincing working-class families that it will affect them, too, and playing to the fanciful imaginations of those who just know that someday they'll be American aristocracy (in spite of the fact that real wages have been dropping annually). That doesn't change the facts of what some progressives like to refer to as the 'Paris Hilton Tax'-- it's never bankrupted a family farm, the campaign's chosen object of sympathy.

The multimillion-dollar lobbying effort to repeal the federal estate tax has been aggressively led by 18 super-wealthy families, according toa report released today by Public Citizens and United for a Fair Economy at a press conference in Washington, D.C. The report details for the first time the vast money, influence and deceptive marketing techniques behind the rhetoric in the campaign to repeal the tax.

It reveals how 18 families worth a total of $185.5 billion have financed and coordinated a 10-year effort to repeal the estate tax, a move that would collectively net them a windfall of $71.6 billion.

The report profiles the families and their businesses, which include the families behind Wal-Mart, Gallo wine, Campbell’s soup, and Mars Inc., maker of M&Ms. Collectively, the list includes the first- and third-largest privately held companies in the United States, the richest family in Alabama and the world’s largest retailer.

These families have sought to keep their activities anonymous by using associations to represent them and by forming a massive coalition of business and trade associations dedicated to pushing for estate tax repeal. The report details the groups they have hidden behind – the trade associations they have used, the lobbyists they have hired, and the anti-estate tax political action committees, 527s and organizations to which they have donated heavily.

In a massive public relations campaign, the families have also misled the country by giving the mistaken impression that the estate tax affects most Americans. In particular, they have used small businesses and family farms as poster children for repeal, saying that the estate tax destroys both of these groups. But just more than one-fourth of one percent of all estates will owe any estate taxes in 2006. And the American Farm Bureau, a member of the anti-estate tax coalition, was unable when asked by The New York Times to cite a single example of a family being forced to sell its farm because of estate tax liability.

The Smoking Gun featured a story that demonstrates the real beneficiaries of Estate Tax repeal:

Alice Walton, the Wal-Mart heir worth $6 billion, might want to shell out some of that dough for a chauffeur. The 48-year-old Arkansas woman was arrested in late-January on drunken driving charges after her Toyota ran off a road and hit a gas meter. Walton suffered a broken nose when her face greeted the steering wheel. An unruly Walton, the daughter of late Wal-Mart boss Sam Walton, refused to take a blood-alcohol test and, according to these police reports, asked officers, “You know who I am, don’t you? You know my last name?”