Today’s New York Times  reports that one of the more cynical attempts at drastically cutting the estate tax has gone down to defeat in the Senate.  Proponents of repeal in the House had linked an increase in the minimum wage to the new tax cut proposal which failed in the Senate by four votes. It should not pass without notice that one of the big losers here is Majority Leader Bill Frist (R- Tenn) whose estate (consisting of his interest in his family’s share of Health Corporation of America) would save  literally tens of millions of dollars if the measure had passed.

Your faithful blogger understands that many out there are slow to characterize this as a "war on the middle class" but I am slow to find any other appropriate adjectives to describe a situation where a much-needed increase in the minimum wage is linked to an estate tax cut which will benefit far less than 1% of taxpayers while further concentrating wealth in the hands of fewer Americans and creating a revenue shortfall that the rest of us in far more mundane income brackets will have to make up.