The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote today on making permanent the repeal of the death tax. The Bush tax cuts passed in 2001 provided that the estate tax will be totally repealed in 2010 — but only for a year. After that, the tax returns at Clinton levels, 55%. It’s led to plenty of grim humor about why it will make good economic sense to die in 2010 — humor that, incidentally, is borne out by research. A February 2001 paper by Wojciech Kopczuk and Joel Slemrod of the University of Michigan was called “Dying to Save Taxes: Evidence From Estate Tax Returns on the Death Elasticity.” It examined the timing of deaths resulting in taxable estates for the periods around 13 major changes in the estate tax.” There is a statistically significant relationship between the probability of dying in the low-tax period and the tax saving from so doing,” the study found. “A $1,000 tax saving increases the probability of dying just before a tax increase by 1%, while the same amount of saving increases the probability of dying just after a tax decrease by almost 2.5%.” Never mind Governor Pataki’s talk of “job-killing taxes:”The 2011 increase in the federal estate tax is going to be a life-killing tax, which is truly grotesque. So it’s good to see the House moving to address the issue.

Even ceding the fact that everyone has to die sometime, the arguments against the estate tax are by now well rehearsed. The tax raises little money for the federal government yet imposes huge inefficiencies and costs of compliance and avoidance. The super-rich figure out ways around it through life insurance, generation-skipping trusts, and clever estate-planning lawyers and accountants. It creates an incentive to spend extravagantly rather than to live frugally. It complicates a difficult and emotional period for families and family businesses — a loved one’s death — with financial pressure from the government. The death tax’s advocates, the same liberal folks at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities who were behind last week’s expansion of the child tax credit for people who pay little or no income tax, complain that getting rid of it would hurt charitable giving. But Boston College professor Paul Schervish has written in the Chronicle of Philanthropy that “Doing away with the estate tax would increase not only the amount of giving, but also the quality of giving. Indeed, it would be the basis for a new era of spiritual depth in philanthropy, making the voluntary act of charity more fully a work of liberty and humanitarian care, and less the windfall fruit of a convoluted tax strategy.” Here’s hoping that all of us live to see Congress give Mr. Schervish a chance to be proven right.