Death and taxes

The Birmingham News today confirms that U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., called a Birmingham estate tax expert a couple of weeks after Hurricane Katrina to share "his plan to use the death of a Gulf Coast business owner to argue for the repeal of the estate tax."

Time magazine reported about that phone call on Saturday, but what that article didn't tell you is that those damn liberals and their omnipresent agenda bear every bit of the blame. No, seriously, that's Sessions' explanation: "It was just a push back to the group that was trying to use Katrina as a basis to block permanently or indefinitely the death tax (repeal)."

Fortunately, Sessions sees that now is no time for finger-pointing or opportunism. Now is the time for action, and there's no better way to alleviate the misery of Alabamians, Louisianans, and Mississippians who have lost everything than by lending a hand to estate tax victims like this one: "If somebody had died during this storm ... and their business was substantially damaged and the revenue was lost, ... a counterargument would be, how can these business owners ever recover if they pay a 45 percent death tax?"

And a counterargument to that would be that perhaps being dead frustrates the hypothetical business owner's recovery efforts more than the estate tax, but you get the idea.