A Tax Bill and Gay Marriage

An IBM manager's $363,053 federal estate tax bill on the death in 2009 of her spouse, a clinical psychologist, is what triggered President Obama's decision to disavow the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional, Bloomberg News reports. The Bloomberg article doesn't get into the point, but it's interesting that Mr. Obama handled this one with the approach of getting rid of the Defense of Marriage Act rather than by getting rid of the estate tax, which would have been another way of addressing the same problem going forward.