Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro ask an intriguing question: “Why would anyone who could see straight imagine that a tax paid by only 2 percent of the wealthiest Americans [the estate tax] could be abolished?” (p. 12). But legislation in 2001 did just that, at least temporarily. (If Congress does not act again, however, the estate tax, scheduled to expire in 2010, will revive in 2011.)

To be sure, the 2% figure does not include those who spend time and money successfully avoiding the tax. Still, for most of us, having an estate large enough to be taxed is only a nice dream. Until recently, “reform” had been directed not at repeal but at things like protecting family businesses. Then, in the late 1990s, all of a sudden—or so it seemed—complete repeal became a possibility. And those who should have supported the tax were unprepared.

Similarly counterintuitive results have occurred before. For example, Susan Murnane (“Selling Scientific Taxation: The Treasury Department's Campaign for Tax Reform in the 1920s,” Law & Social Inquiry 29 [Fall 2004]: 819–56) has chronicled how, when the income tax applied only to high-income taxpayers, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon was successful in making lower rates politically popular. Even Mellon, however, was unable to get the estate tax repealed; doing so took another 75 years.

Graetz and Shapiro describe how this occurred. Parts of Death by a Thousand Cuts are difficult slogging—taxation can be sleep inducing—but, for the most part, the book is riveting. It is a brilliant case study, and it is packed with essays on public opinion, the rise of conservative think tanks, and much more. It is a particularly rich source for students of legislative process, including a discussion of policymaking in the shadow of budget reconciliation demands.

Some of the reasons repeal succeeded have become part of conventional wisdom. Characterizing the levy as the “death tax” was a stroke of genius. Death affects us all, and slogans like “You shouldn't have to visit the undertaker and the taxman on the same day” (p. 81) resonated. And repeal proponents artfully used “horror stories” (p. 51) to illustrate the potentially destructive effect of estate taxation on family businesses. For example, a black Mississippi tree farmer's concerns about the tax (even though it could not possibly have applied to him) made for powerful politics. The public cannot evaluate technical arguments—economists were divided on the merits anyway—and “stories trump science” (p. 221). (Opponents of repeal could have used stories, too, of shiftless rich kids who do not deserve silver spoons, but they did not.)

The labels and storytelling were not everything, of course. The public did not care much one way or the other about the estate tax. (One reason Democrats were lulled into thinking repeal could go nowhere was the low priority taxpayers gave to the tax.) But those who did care cared very much and put together an imaginative strategy for repeal. They separated consideration of the estate tax from overall budgetary matters and treated the tax, standing alone, as an issue of fairness.

The importance of coupling fairness with the economic case for repeal cannot be overstated. There are good reasons to be skeptical of the tax—resources are wasted in avoiding it, the tax affects incentives to save for the kids' futures, and so on—but it was mind-boggling that repeal came to occupy the moral high ground.

Yet that is what happened, accompanied by some surprising demographics. One of the pervasive themes in the book is the extent to which Americans overestimate their places in the economic hierarchy and accept a conservative vision of social mobility. Many lower-income persons thus opposed the estate tax on fairness grounds, as did many African Americans. For those who had just made it, or hoped to do so soon, the tax was just unfair. And Bob Johnson, the first black billionaire, made a practical (as well as self-serving) argument: The tax takes away seed capital that black businesses require to succeed.

Did money matter in repeal? Yes, of course, but not because votes were being bought. In fact, Graetz and Shapiro conclude that campaign finance laws had, and could have had, no effect on their story: No significant amount of campaign contributions related to the estate tax. Nevertheless, many congressmen have powerful constituents who care about the tax, and, most important, money funded the organizations, including think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, that carried the political message across the land.

From a lawyer's perspective, Death by a Thousand Cuts teaches a valuable lesson about the limits of legislation. No matter how well intentioned, a statute must be comprehensible to be administered. Recognizing that the estate tax could destroy small businesses, Congress in 1997 had provided protection for so-called Qualified Family Owned Business Interests. That goal was praiseworthy, but the result (a myriad of rules distinguishing qualified from unqualified interests) was a monster (or, if you prefer, a tax lawyer's opportunity). The failure of piecemeal corrections actually furthered the push for complete repeal.

This is all interesting, a cynic might say, but why should the 98% of us who are not subject to the estate tax care? It is not as though a lot of federal revenue is at stake. Here is Graetz and Shapiro's biggest point: What is dying by a thousand cuts is not the estate tax itself but the very idea of progressive taxation. (Graetz, formerly Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Policy, wrote eloquently about this in The Decline [and Fall?] of the Income Tax, 1997.) Repeal of the estate tax was but one step in a process of reorienting American government, of shifting taxation away from wealth and capital income. That goal is debatable—Graetz and Shapiro are skeptics—but if progressivity is to disappear, it should result from a discussion on the merits, not from a thousand discrete cuts.