No billionaire left behind
By 
This piece is a little too reductive for my taste, but the author makes some good points:
The modern Republican Party has devolved into a tax avoidance scam for rich people. The scam is a masterpiece of psychological manipulation, in which the racial, cultural and economic anxieties of (mostly white) voters are exploited, in order to get those voters to support policies that transfer ever-greater percentages of wealth from themselves to the top 0.1 percent.
It really isn’t any more complicated than that. Everything else – the “culture wars,” the continual hysteria about terrorism, the non-stop rhetoric about how the mainstream media, the universities, the scientists, and basically the rest of the modern world are all biased against conservatives – it’s all just so much noise, designed to solve the tricky problem of how to get ordinary people to support economic policies that make them poorer and rich people richer. . .
Besides lying about the estate tax’s actual effects, Republicans rely on two other widespread fallacies to convince people who will never pay any estate taxes that they ought to favor lessening the tax “burden” on idle trust funders, living off piles of inherited wealth.
One is captured by the statement, attributed to John Steinbeck, that in America “the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” In other words, optimism bias leads people to wildly overestimate the odds that someday they, too, will be in a position to bequeath vast sums to their families.
The other fallacy is even more basic and pernicious: contemporary Republican ideology is built around the idea – rarely stated outright, but implied by so many GOP policies– that taxes in general are simply immoral, and indeed a form of theft. The estate tax is wrong, according to this line of reasoning, because it’s wrong to “penalize” people for being rich, even if they got rich by inheriting somebody else’s money.
This preposterous notion is at the very core of the modern Republican Party, and its centrality is a prime example of how the GOP has become nothing more than a cleverly disguised grifting operation, run for the benefit of the rich.