Senator Grassley and these columns have had our differences over the years on matters ranging from non-profit hospitals to the taxes for hedge fund managers, and don’t even get us started on ethanol subsidies. So it’s a pleasure to find the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee taking a position we can wholeheartedly endorse, favoring the repeal of the death tax. Mr. Grassley’s remarks at a hearing on the topic were so on point that they are worth repeating here.

“I believe that the estate tax, or death tax, is unjust from a philosophical and from a technical viewpoint,” the senator said. “From a philosophical perspective, I have always said that death should not be a taxable event. There is something fundamentally wrong when the government swoops in after a funeral to take a cut of what that person had worked their whole life for, and has already paid taxes on at least once. Any monetary benefit obtained by any individual is either taxed or not taxed for a very specific reason. As long as a person has accumulated an estate in accordance with the law, the government should not be able to profit from that person’s death.”

The senator called the tax, er, “fatally flawed,” explaining that, “owing to a due date of nine months after a death, the estate tax forces survivors to liquidate assets in economically poor circumstances. Instead of the free market determining when assets are bought or sold, the death tax makes that determination. As most people are not privy to the exact date they will hand over half of everything they own to the government, the death tax is fundamentally not fair.”

The death tax is totally repealed for the year 2010 — a good year to die, if your estate qualifies — but Mr. Grassley warned that unless Congress acts before 2011, the estate tax will return that year “to a rate of 55%, and sometimes up to 60%, of assets above a $1 million unified credit amount.” The Joint Tax Committee estimates that in 2011, almost 62,000 estates will be subject to the tax. Here’s hoping Congress acts sooner rather than later to make the repeal permanent. If there’s a feeling that goes too far, we’re open, as we explained in the April 19, 2005 editorial “A Capital Idea,” to removing the current step-up in basis that applies at death and instead using a “carry-over basis” for capital gains taxes on inherited assets. These are details to be worked out once a majority of Congress reaches Mr. Grassley’s philosophical conclusion that “death should not be a taxable event.”