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According to a study by the American Family Business Foundation, just stopping President Obama’s death tax hike alone would create 1.5 million jobs.

However, the administration ghoulishly favors doing exactly the opposite. Raising the death tax, as currently proposed, would destroy 500,000 jobs, according to a study by the former head of the Congressional Budget Office and the president of Research on the Economics of Taxation. Nor does the government “need” the money. As it is, only about one percent of the total federal tax collections in 2008 came through this tax. Moreover, as the Tax Foundation has found, most of that revenue was largely diverted from other government accounts. Without the death tax, that is, other forms of taxation would still have gathered much of the revenue.

The federal government is also employing a class-warfare gambit with the punitive estate tax, trying to convince the public that this only affects the uber-wealthy. Yet, such levies also hurt small-business owners and their ability to create and sustain jobs; those that inherit, not infrequently, find themselves obliged to liquidate their assets in order to pay death taxes.

Perhaps worse, as Hadley Heath has written for the Independent Women’s Forum, it is “inherently wrong” to take half “of someone’s honestly earned life’s work.” She continues:

Most individuals who leave death taxable inheritances have spent years and years working, saving, and contributing greatly to America’s economy. The wealth they leave to their heirs has also already been taxed, often multiple times. They have paid income taxes and taxes on the gains realized through investments. Any homes, cars, farms, land, jewelry, or other goods purchased were bought with after-tax dollars, and they probably paid sales taxes on those goods too.

Senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) this summer attempted (unsuccessfully) to deep-six the death tax permanently. As he noted, the tax “kills jobs, hurts small businesses, destroys family farms and President Obama’s plan to hike it from zero percent to 55 percent next year is unconscionable.” If implemented, “Washington could get over half of family estates, farms and small businesses, a greater inheritance than the children of the deceased.”

Humorist Will Rogers was more deadly accurate than funny when he pointed out that “the only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.”