For the last several campaign cycles, the Democratic Party has gained seats in the House of Representatives by campaigning against Republicans’ tax cuts for the rich. So, what has the Democratic majority in the House done now that the Democrats control both houses of Congress? They’ve voted in favor of a big tax cut for the rich.

H.R. 4154, passed yesterday, was introduced by Blue Dog Democrat Earl Pomeroy. All but 26 Democrats voted for the tax cut, and those 26 voted against the legislation because they wanted even bigger tax cuts for wealthy Americans.

At question was the estate tax. Currently, the estate tax applies to all inheritances above one million dollars. Do you know anyone who has received one million dollars of inheritance? The chances are slim. Less than two percent of Americans have had to pay any estate tax ever in their lives, at current tax levels.

The estate tax is not, right wing propaganda aside, a death tax. The estate tax does not collect taxes from people when they die. Rather, the estate tax applies when people receive huge inheritances. It’s not a tax on death, but a tax on a kind of income that children lucky enough to be born into wealthy families get, but the rest of us never do. It’s a tax on people like Paris Hilton, who live as adults on the money earned by their parents.

Pomeroy’s bill took current estate tax levels and reduced them by 18 percent. The minimum tax-free inheritance was also raised, so that whereas people inheriting a million dollars didn’t have to pay any tax at all, now people inheriting three and a half million dollars get away with paying no taxes on the income.

It’s a tax cut designed to apply only to the very wealthy. The middle class doesn’t get a share. American families trying to survive on minimum wage certainly don’t get anything.

In fact, we working Americans are going to be paying for the Democrats’ tax cut for the wealthy. Pomeroy’s wealthy-only tax cut is going to cost the government billions of dollars every year. Who’s going to have to pay for that cost? Working Americans, that’s who.

The Democrats’ tax cut ensures that less than one quarter of one percent of Americans will have to pay any estate tax, and what even those people pay will be substantially reduced. For this tax cut to come in the same year when finance executives got hundreds of billions of dollars in government bailout money, much of which went to pay extremely high bonuses to people who couldn’t even do their jobs right goes beyond outrageous. It’s obscene.