Oct 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Jeffrey A. Cooper, associate professor, Quinnipiac University School of Law, Hamden, Conn.

By: By Jeffrey A. Cooper, associate professor, Quinnipiac University School of Law, Hamden, Conn.

As Election Day 2006 approaches, state politicians increasingly set their sights on a familiar political enemy: taxes. While all taxes make popular targets, this year state estate taxes are attracting heightened attention. In her state-of-the-state address, Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell argued for a doubling of her state's estate tax exemption to $4 million — as a step towards the tax's ultimate elimination. At around the same time, in response to polls showing that the estate tax was among the voters' “least favored types of taxes,”¹ Maryland Governor Bob Ehrlich urged his legislature to increase his state's estate tax exemption to $3.5 million. And New York Governor George Pataki, widely thought to be positioning himself for a 2008 run for the presidency, proposed a complete repeal of New York's state estate tax in his final state-of-the-state address, to “encourage seniors to spend their golden years in New York.”²

These governors are far from alone in their calls for eliminating state estate taxes as a step towards prosperity and popularity. A 2004 study found that state politicians, like many of their federal counterparts, increasingly oppose estate and other related taxes. According to the study's authors Karen Smith Conway and Jonathan C. Rork, the trend is a national one, with state leaders across the country catering to “the growing size and political influence of the elderly population.”³ In other words, states are pleading with aging baby boomers: “Please die here.”

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