Bill to Repeal Estate Tax

* Re “House Approves Proposal to Phase Out ‘Death Tax,’ ” June 10:

Washington is about money; whoever has it has the power. That is what drives President Clinton’s threat to veto the repeal of the “death tax,” not his interest in Social Security, Medicare and paying down the debt. His priorities are the long list of expenditures he outlined in his State of the Union address; his goal is redistribution of wealth and transfer of more power to the U.S. government. If he really needs money to cover Social Security, stop counting those taxes as surplus and set them aside for their intended use. Put a halt to the disgusting pork-barrel spending.

It is not your movie stars, big-bucks athletes or the entrepreneurs who are tapped for even a fraction of their wealth. They have the tax gurus to tell them how to avoid taxation. It’s just an average citizen who works hard, saves his money, lives within his means, benefits from inflation or a good economy and ends up with an estate worth several million. It doesn’t matter that what’s left has been taxed many times over, the government steps up and says, “Gee, thanks, we’ll take half of that.”

JOYCE B. GOETZ

Westlake Village

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* The minor disadvantages of the estate tax can easily be fixed by lowering the rates for estates under $10 million and increasing the exemptions for such estates. The elimination of the estate tax would create havoc with America’s most treasured institutions, such as our churches, universities, cultural institutions and other nonprofit organizations. All of these organizations depend on bequests from very wealthy individuals for their existence. Surely, no one can believe that bequests to churches, universities and other humanitarian organizations and the creation of the great charitable foundations of America were done without regard to the estate-tax consequences.

It would seem that the conservatives who claim to want smaller government would not want to take actions that would have the effect of greatly harming valuable nongovernmental institutions.

LAWRENCE B. STARR

Los Angeles