buffet and the inheritance tax

From AlterNet.com:.

Billionaire Warren Buffett testified before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday in defense of the federal estate tax, the nation's only tax on inherited wealth.

Buffett invoked the historical roots of the estate tax, established in 1916 during the Gilded Age to put a brake on anti-democratic concentrations of wealth and power. "Dynastic wealth, the enemy of meritocracy, is on the rise," Buffett told the panel. "Equality of opportunity has been on the decline. A progressive and meaningful estate tax is needed to curb the movement of a democracy toward plutocracy."

Buffet gets it. This taxation is needed as a means of preventing the rich from passing their throne down to their children, and then their grandchildren, and then their great grandchildren. In the past our culture knew of the risks of allowing too much private economic power to accumulate in the hands of the few; so many of us have lost that lesson.

Republican Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, complained that "the death tax" was "fundamentally wrong." Buffett responded that use of the phase "death tax" was "intellectually dishonest" and "clever, Orwellian and dead wrong."

Has Buffet been reading Lakoff? The theory is that the phrase "death tax" cuts out the reality of this taxation by putting the emphasis on taxation following death instad of taxation preceding inheritance.