The October 2003 Lawrence Summers Memorial Award* goes to Grover Norquist, the conservative activist who runs Americans for Tax Reform.

Asked by National Public Radio's Terry Gross about the fairness of eliminating the inheritance tax, which affects only the richest 2 percent of the U.S. population (.1 percent pay half of the overall estate tax), Norquist said:

"The good news about the move to abolish the death tax, the tax where they come and look at how much money you've got when you die, how much gold is in your teeth and they want half of it, is that -- you're right, there's an exemption for -- I don't know -- maybe a million dollars now, and it's scheduled to go up a little bit. However, 70 percent of the American people want to abolish that tax. Congress, the House and Senate, have three times voted to abolish it. The president supports abolishing it, so that tax is going to be abolished."

"I think it speaks very much to the health of the nation that 70-plus percent of Americans want to abolish the death tax, because they see it as fundamentally unjust. The argument that some who played at the politics of hate and envy and class division will say, ëYes, well, that's only 2 percent,' or as people get richer 5 percent in the near future of Americans likely to have to pay that tax."

"I mean, that's the morality of the Holocaust. ëWell, it's only a small percentage,' you know. ëI mean, it's not you, it's somebody else.'"

Source: "Fresh Air," October 2, 2003.