What a way to lighten up a weekend morning. We speak of the full-page ad from Bessemer Trust. “How many times are you planning to pay tax on the same money?” was its headline. “Each time your wealth gets passed on to the next generation, it is taxed again,” the ad went on. “In fact, without proper tax counseling and estate planning, the government can take up to 75 percent of your wealth by the third generation.” The advertisement went on to talk about how at Bessemer Trust, tax advisers “continuously coordinate with you, your attorneys and your accountants to scrutinize your situation and find the best current tactics that fit your needs — like family limited partnerships or generation-skipping trusts.”

If this sounds not funny but scary, consider the fact that the ad appeared in, of all places, the New York Times, which editorialized on April 15, 2005, in favor of the death tax. “The only thing driving the push for repealing the estate tax is ideology. It sure isn’t sound tax policy,” the newspaper wrote. We had mentioned the point in a March 4, 2008, editorial, “The Non-Sulzberger Death Tax,” observing that the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., had, according to the New York Post, sold his Upper West Side apartment to his wife for $3.25 million for what a Times spokeswoman described as “estate-planning purposes.”

Bessemer Trust clients — “Minimum relationship $10 million,” according to the ad — may be able to afford their own attorneys and accountants and the management fees that Bessemer charges, and the time to “continuously coordinate” with them on devising ways to get around the estate tax, ways as abstruse as selling your spouse the apartment in which you both reside. But wouldn’t it be healthier for the country if all that time and money were spent on something more productive? Meanwhile, unless Congress acts, the death tax is scheduled to re-appear in 2011 at a 55% top marginal rate and an exclusion of $1 million, or, as we like to put it, well below the cost of an average apartment in Manhattan.

Those hurt the most by it will be those with assets between $1 million and $10 million who haven’t hired the lawyers and accountants and fancy private wealth managers to help them avoid the tax. In other words, the little guy. Meanwhile, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the third generation of his family to serve as publisher of the Times, has managed to preserve his own wealth pretty well by selling ads on how to avoid the estate tax while running editorials campaigning to preserve it.