Congressional Republicans are preparing to add to the federal debt by pushing through more tax cuts for the super-rich after just pushing through a $70 billion tax cut that mostly benefits the wealthy. When the Senate resumes work after Memorial Day, Senate Republicans will once again take up their assault on the estate tax, a tax levied solely on the wealthiest Americans. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) remains committed to repealing the dynasty tax despite mounting evidence against repeal, the most recently of which being a report by the Federal Reserve Board (FRB) finding that during a 15-year period ending in 2004 "there was a shift in favor of the top of the [wealth] distribution." The report traces the distribution of wealth among Americans from 1989 to 2004 and shows that over that time the rich have become richer while the poor have lost ground. As the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans saw their share of the country's wealth increase from 30.1 percent to 33.4 percent over the time period, the poorest 50 percent watched their share of wealth decline from 3.0 percent to 2.5 percent. In addition to the troubling wealth trend, the FRB report indicates that a staggeringly large majority of business assets (88.7 percent), bonds (93.7 percent), and nonresidential real estate (71.7 percent) are owned by the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans. Repeal of the estate tax would further skew wealth accumulation toward the richest Americans allowing even more accumulated wealth to pass within the same families from generation to generation, out of reach of the 90 percent of Americans who collectively own less than the wealthiest 1 percent. A repeal of the estate tax would be an enormous windfall for the richest families in America. Indeed, Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy in the recent report entitled Spending Millions to Save Billions reported that those who would gain the most from an estate tax repeal have funded, from behind the scenes, the campaign for repeal. Since 1998, a "handful of super-wealthy families" have spent some $400 million on lobbying efforts to repeal of the estate tax. As reported in March in The Watcher, income inequality is on the rise even in the midst of strong GDP growth. The repeal of the estate tax is just another wedge to further separate the super-rich from the middle class. At the same time repeal of the estate tax would continue to widen America's enormous wealth gap and drastically reduce government revenue, further hampering its efforts to maintain and expand an American middle class. A recent commentary by Sebastian Mallaby in the Washington Post makes a powerful argument that extreme tax cut policies, such as repealing the estate tax, amount to nothing more than "voodoo economics" and are incredibly dangerous to our nation's fiscal health. Mallaby points out that former Bush administration chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, N. Gregory Mankiw and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Bush administration economist and head of the Congressional Budget Office, along with a number of other economists, have repeatedly averred that tax cuts do not pay for themselves. "Ignoring their solutions is like ignoring the judgment of medical science in favor of faith healers and quacks," according to Mallaby.