The modern estate tax was born in 1916, alongside the federal income tax. Except during the 1930s, when several tweaks to the law increased its share of federal revenue, its contribution to the Treasury has been extremely consistent, always hovering around 1 percent of federal taxes.

Estate and Gift Taxes as Share of Total U.S. Revenue

IRS

The law has faced occasional resistance but few serious attempts at repeal. But starting in the 1990s, conservatives mobilized to end the tax for good. A widely cited 1994 study from the right-leaning Tax Foundation reported that it discouraged entrepreneurship. Meanwhile, Republicans worked aggressively to end the estate tax, finding purchase in two arguments against it.

First, they rallied around the moniker “death tax.” This succeeded in persuading many Americans that the law threatened upper-middle-class families. In a 2001 Gallup survey, 17 percent of Americans said they feared they owed estate taxes, at least eight times higher than the actual figure. From a marketing perspective, this was quite brilliant.

From a descriptive standpoint, it was quite misleading. To the extent that the estate tax is a “death tax,” it is the least effective tax ever devised—not because it fails to discourage death, but because it fails, even more basically, to tax it. In 2013, 2.6 million people died. Fewer than 5,000 of them had taxable estates. That means, each year, the so-called death tax fails miserably in its job, missing more than 99.8 percent of the year’s deaths.

Second, Republicans have for two decades found it useful to claim that the law hurts independent farmers, presumably because this makes it seem like the tax is striking at the nation’s traditional agrarian heart. This past week, Gary Cohn, the White House chief economic adviser, made an impassioned plea that the estate tax holds a special cruelty for America’s farms. “You have a family farm that’s big enough that it’s going to hit the estate tax, you start paying lawyers, consultants, and accountants to break up your land, and break up your farm,” he said.

The idea that the estate tax is destroying the lives of thousands of ordinary family farmers is an urban legend (or, technically speaking, a rural legend). When I called up Len Burman, an economist at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center (TPC), to ask if Cohn were making any sense, Burman assured me that he was not. “If Cohn were trying to make a parody of the rich people’s argument for the estate tax, he couldn’t have done a better job,” Burman said. In the early 2000s, the American Farm Bureau Federation failed to name a single example of a farm lost to the estate tax. This year there are fewer than 100 farms in the U.S. that will owe any estate tax in the U.S., according to TPC estimates. Their average tax rate will be approximately 6 percent.