HOUSE VOTES TO REPEAL THE DEATH TAX IS STEP IN RIGHT DIRECTION

The historic June 9 vote by the U.S. House of Representatives to phase out the death tax over a 10-year period was a heck of a way to start the 21st century. In fact, a pretty good case could be made that if the Congress had done nothing else for 12 months but pass a budget and this piece of legislation before adjourning and going home till January, it would have been one excellent year's work.

This smashing Republican victory, won in the face of veto threats from the president, was by the astonishingly large margin of 279-136. No fewer than 65 Democrats joined Republicans to deliver an awesome victory for the pro-growth, tax-cutting movement. (Add in a few Republicans who favored the plan but were absent for this vote, and you probably have a veto-proof majority.)

These 65 Democrats, who crossed over despite stale rhetoric from minority leader Dick Gephardt that this was a "gigantic tax cut for the rich," put the lie to the constant chattering of the media-Democratic coalition that tax-cutting has lost its appeal. Peter Jennings, Dan Rather and Geraldo Rivera: Call your offices. It would appear that the tired old class-warfare rhetoric so beloved of Jennings and Rather, Rivera and Gephardt, just won't take you as far as it used to. As The Wall Street Journal noted, the Democratic "aye" votes included a significant slice of the Black Caucus and much of the liberal California delegation. Behold a world changing rapidly before your eyes.

Steve Forbes displayed the right stuff when he quipped, "No taxation without respiration!"

Should the Clintons decide on a veto, let 'em. Their vice president will pay the price in a fall campaign featuring a riveting national debate on the question: "Should Americans have to visit the tax collector as soon as they've left the parlor of their friendly local undertaker?"

Another of the stories you haven't been told by the national media lately is that congressional Democrats have been voting overwhelmingly for Republican tax-cutting proposals. As former congressional aide Stephen Moore, now of the Cato Institute, recently wrote: "We won the battle on the Social Security earnings test -- a tax penalty against seniors who work after age 65 -- by an almost unanimous vote. We had been fighting for this for 20 years! A majority of Democrats support marriage-tax penalty relief. About 50 Democrats voted to scrap the current income-tax code."

This tax forces sales of farms and small businesses when heirs who'd like to hang on can't do so without selling out to pay the punishing estate taxes. A Progressive-era tax enacted 85 years ago to soak the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts hits the middle class hardest. Women and minorities are very often owners of small and medium-sized businesses. After sacrificing daily to build a business to reinvest their profits, all the while paying tax after tax, they soon find that the legacy of their hard work, which they hoped to pass on to their children, will go to the tax man. A little-noted effect of the death tax is to discourage savings by raising the cost of capital and encouraging consumption. As a Heritage Foundation paper recently put it, under current law "it makes more sense to buy vacations in Colorado or a painting by Rubens than to invest in new production equipment or expand a business" that would hire more people.

A battle cry for the fall: Death to the death tax!

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.