In today’s Wall Street Journal, Robert Rubin and Julian Robertson argue that Congress should reinstate the currently defunct tax on estates retroactively:

Ordinarily in tax matters, the effective date would not precede the date of enactment, or at least the date that a measure was introduced, because Congress knows that taxpayers make their plans based on the existing code. But in the case of the estate tax, presumably nobody’s demise was affected in timing by the structuring of our tax laws.

Yet the Journal reported in December:

To make it easier on their heirs, some clients are putting provisions into their health-care proxies allowing whoever makes end-of-life medical decisions to consider changes in estate-tax law. ‘We have done this at least a dozen times, and have gotten more calls recently,’ says Andrew Katzenstein, a lawyer with Proskauer Rose LLP in Los Angeles.

For more arguments against the tax, see Greg Mankiw’s remarks from 2003.