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There's an old saying, sometimes attributed to Andrew Carnegie, "From shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations."

The idea is that the first generation, often immigrants to the United States in the late 1800s, rolled up their shirt sleeves, worked hard and amassed vast fortunes. However, the pampered heirs to their estates, never having acquired the discipline that comes from having to work for a living, squandered the fortunes. Consequently, their sons and daughters, the third generation, were forced to return to rolled-up shirt sleeves and hard work.

This maxim came to mind recently with the news that the political fight over the estate tax will be renewed in May in the U.S. Senate. A number of senators, primarily Republicans, want to eliminate the tax or, at least, reduce it. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist vowed at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, "I will do everything in my power to bury the death tax once and for all!"

Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl wants to limit the tax to estates over $5 million per spouse, and to limit the tax rate to 15 percent, the capital gains rate. Those are changes that would greatly diminish the effectiveness of the tax, which raises about $25 billion per year, or roughly 1 percent of federal revenue.

Much misinformation and public relations propaganda swirl throughout the debate. Proponents of repealing the tax have gained great mileage out of labeling it a "death tax," for instance, and the claims are unsupported that "many" businesses and family farms must be sold to allow heirs to pay the estate tax.

The PR campaign has worked: More than 20 percent of Americans strongly support repealing a tax that this year will affect less than one-third of 1 percent of the nation's most wealthy people. That means only an estimated 6,343 estates will pay the tax for 2006, according to the nonprofit advocacy organization United for a Fair Economy.

One thing frequently missing from the debate is whether huge inheritances are good for individuals or for society.

You may be thinking right now that you would be willing to take the risk that inheriting millions of dollars might somehow be bad for you. I'd probably take that risk, too.

Even so, there are some impressive people who argue that dramatically reducing or repealing the estate tax would be bad for society. Among those impressive people are the nation's two wealthiest men, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett, as well as Gates' father, William Gates Sr., a semiretired lawyer who runs the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Gates the father even wrote a book supporting the tax, titled "Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes." It's not widely popular, however. On Wednesday, Amazon.com listed it as the 100,912th best seller among books.

Gates Sr. argues that the tax is a "due bill," a tax that causes those who had the good fortune to accumulate immense wealth to pay back the society that made their success possible with its infrastructure, legal order, stable markets and government-financed research and technology.

"Death tax — phooey!" Gates told an interviewer from the nonprofit advocacy organization RESULTS on Tuesday. "This is a tax on grateful heirs."

For his part, Buffett once told The New York Times that repealing the tax "would be a terrible mistake," the equivalent "of choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the eldest sons of the gold-medal winners in the 2000 Olympics." He argued that the tax helps create a society in which success is based on merit, not inheritance.

Beyond that, there is evidence that the estate tax encourages charitable giving. A 2004 report by the Congressional Budget Office estimated that without the estate tax, the very wealthy would cut their charitable giving by 20 to 30 percent.

That would be a huge loss to the nation's charities, equivalent to eliminating all grant-making by the country's 110 largest foundations, according to a Brookings Institution analysis.

Finally, the tax places a brake on the growth of vast private fortunes that allow the very rich to concentrate political power and to influence public policy to their own advantage, Gates Sr. told USA Today.

Indeed, Gates argued that it is "people of enormous wealth" who are trying "to get rid of this tax, which they regard as, you know, as a burden they just don't want to pay."

My opinion