From Harold Meyerson's latest column arguing for a repeal of the estate tax repeal.

Spring has given way to summer's full-furnace heat in Washington, apparently taking with it any scintilla of sense that Congress may yet possess.

In the House, Republicans who could not even raise an eyebrow at reports that the National Security Agency has been conducting warrantless wiretaps of Americans became instant civil libertarians when the FBI conducted a search of a congressman's office.

The Senate, meanwhile, is scheduled next week to take up legislation by Arizona Republican Jon Kyl that would permanently repeal the estate tax on the wealthiest Americans. If enacted, Kyl's bill would plunge the government another trillion dollars into the red during the first decade (2011-2021) that it would be in effect.

It's not possible that a tax on the wealthy should be stopped. If the government must stop spending so much money, so be it. That's a benefit, not a drawback. (Although current evidence proves that "starve the beast" is a joke.) When attempting to deflect logic, defer the best options with alarmist, class-driven drivel:

Even a paltry $500 billion, of course, is a lot of money to drain from public coffers just when boomers are going onto Social Security and Medicare and the number of employers providing health insurance, if present trends continue, might have dropped to a virtuous handful. To cover those and other needs, Congress will either plunge us deeper into debt or increase some other levies -- payroll taxes, say -- that will come out of the pockets of the 99 percent of Americans whom the estate tax doesn't touch.

Or stop spending. Why should wealthy Americans be a convenience store for politicians every time a new pet project needs funding? Saying it should be that way doesn't make it reasonable.

A decades-long campaign by right-wing activists (brilliantly documented by Yale professors Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro in their book "Death by a Thousand Cuts") has convinced many Americans that the estate tax poses a threat to countless hardworking families. That was always nonsense, and under the estate tax revisions that almost all Democrats support -- raising the threshold for eligibility to $3.5 million for an individual and $7 million for a couple -- it becomes more nonsensical still. Under the $3.5 million exemption, the number of family-owned small businesses required to pay any taxes in the year 2000 would have been just 94, according to a study by the Congressional Budget Office. The number of family farms that would have had to sell any assets to pay that tax would have been 13.

Fine, allow me to accept that assertion for a moment. What's the magic number for families who must sell assets to pay an estate tax bill? It's not 13, which we now know. But is it 14? 140? 1,400? How many factors of ten turn a triviality into a travesty?

On the other hand, an estate tax repeal would save the estate of Vice President Cheney between $13 million and $61 million, according to the publicly available data on his net worth. It would save the estate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld between $32 million and $101 million. The estate of retired Exxon Mobil chairman Lee Raymond would pocket a cozy $164 million. As for the late Sam Walton's kids, whose company already makes taxpayers foot the bill for the medical expenses of thousands of its employees, the cost to the government for not taxing their estates would run into the multiple billions.

Since spending cuts are clearly not an option, I'm not shocked that getting government out of the health care business isn't an option. Bonus points for attacking Wal-Mart, though. That really enhances credibility among progressives.

Why any Democrat would back such a measure, however, is a deep mystery. From the policy standpoint, it would make it vastly more difficult both to shore up programs that Democrats believe need shoring up -- better educating the nation's children, for one -- and to get the nation's fiscal house in order. ...

Out-of-control spending is the culprit. It doesn't matter who's doing it, or why. Acknowledging that is the real step to fiscal sanity, not taxing the wealthy so that they pay their fair share. They already are. Accept it.