Didn’t someone famous say that there is nothing certain in this world except death, taxes, and proliferating lawyers? These three evils come together in the debate over repeal of the federal estate tax.

A Cato supporter alerted me to interesting data showing that there are 52,000 estate planning lawyers in the United States. Let’s say that half of their time is spent on the estate tax, or about 1,000 billable hours a year each. And let’s say that their billable rate is $200 per hour.

What you get is an estate tax lawyer industry of about $10 billion annually. If you added in the costs of all the estate tax accountants, IRS administrators, the estate tax portion of the life insurance industry, and other workers, the costs of estate tax paperwork could be as high as the amount the government collects from the tax — $28 billion annually. That is the definition of a wasteful tax.