(FORTUNE Magazine) – President Bush won't make his case this baldly in his maiden address to Congress next week, but the tacit battle cry of his tax plan is "leave no heir behind!" W.'s call to repeal the "death tax" reflects the clash of values that will rage all year in Washington. Now before you start calling me a socialist (I'm tipping my hand here), let's be straight with each other: My family would win big from an estate tax repeal. So would yours (the average net worth of a FORTUNE reader is $2.2 million). And so would Bush's and his Cabinet members'--their kids stand to gain an extra $200 million, according to my back-of-the-envelope calculations.

Let's transcend our mutual self-interest for a moment and commune as the fair-minded business people we pretend to be. First some facts: The $675,000 per person exemption (which will rise to $1 million by 2006) means that 98% of all estates aren't taxed; a few thousand families pay nearly half the tab; and few families have to hold fire sales to pay their estate tax bills--family farms or firms compose most of the value of just six in 10,000 estates. While Bush touts the death tax's 55% top marginal rate as proof of the scheme's confiscatory madness, by the time you factor in various exemptions, the effective rate on those estates is actually 17%.

The Republican Party's triumph in disguising a $30-billion-a-year boon for heirs is marketing genius of the highest order. The estate tax affects a sliver of the American aristocracy in ways that won't alter these scions' lifestyles. (Even a coalition of plutocrats, including Warren Buffett, is urging Bush to leave the tax in place.) W. needs to ask: Is it right to end the estate tax for the small number of heirs who bear its brunt?

The answer depends on whether you think politics should be about principles or about something down and dirty like justice. As White House economic advisor Larry Lindsey told me, it's easy to feel violated if you're taxed when you earn the money and again after you've saved it. Having the feds swarm in for one last bite after you've died takes statist lust too far.

But that admittedly powerful argument shouldn't end the debate. Politics is an endless series of pragmatic moral tradeoffs: Given our political and economic equilibrium, what should our next priorities be? Our new surpluses have emerged after two decades in which the rich have truly thrived. We should thus compare what $30 billion (rising to $60 billion after 2011) will do for a few wealthy children to what federal cash could do for, say, America's 43 million uninsured, or urban kids without preschool, or some other worthy cause. (Don't tell me you can't think of one.) Despite the President's pledge to "leave no child behind," his budget puts just two new dollars into schools and expanded health coverage for every $3 it hands back to heirs.

Seen this way, an estate tax repeal is hardly "compassionate"; it's not really "conservative" either. As conservative economist Irwin Stelzer argues, it is a contradiction for the right wing to oppose affirmative action and estate taxes. If you're against giving certain groups advantages because of an arbitrary trait like race, how can you be in favor of preserving advantages for others because of an arbitrary asset like rich parents?

But then, no one said the class war would be pretty. Especially inside my own family. My Republican relatives are thrilled by the impending return of "our money." Me, I tell my in-laws that I can't wait until the day America has banished poverty--at that point, I'll gladly crusade against today's unholy denial of heirs' rights. In the meantime, of course, someone has to have the courage to be the idiot son-in-law.

MATTHEW MILLER is a nationally syndicated columnist and L.A.-based senior fellow at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. He can be reached at mattino@worldnet.att.net.