Death tax seems fair and balanced at first sight. It is also dead simple to remember and can easily replace the more harshly sounded "estate tax".
Some of the suggestions being made here seem like coming from latte-drinking intellectuals ;) . Things have to flow naturally and seem unbiased (actually, as we would like to be honest, they should be, in as much as possible, unbiased).
Also, it is interesting to note that some words were actually given a semantic negative charge over time: latte-drinking ;) , intellectual, and tax are examples. These inspire "bad feelings" in a general audience. We either reverse the semantics on tax, or change the word ;) .
There is a youtube bit from the fictional series West Wing, a presidential debate, about taxes and health where the fictional democratic candidate asks what is the difference between paying a tax and a premium. In the meme being circulated around, tax is bad (private insurance premiums are neither positive nor negative as a meme - maybe we should try to change this, especially in comparison with tax) Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness - Bertrand Russell
But remember that most of the right-wing newspeak did not seem objective when it was first introduced [1]. There was a concentrated effort put into making those terms mainstream. Further, remember that the Overton window has - at least in some countries - shifted so far to the right that terms that even attempt to come close to something that might be considered objective by the reality-based community will be considered hopelessly leftist and "unserious."
- Jake
[1] This also holds true for some progressive counter-newspeak - nobody thinks that changing Worldnetdaily to Worldnutdaily is an attempt to be objective. It is, however, so descriptive and so obvious a substitution that it has caught on fairly widely. Ditto for Faux News and Torygraph to replace Fox News and Telegraph. Ceterum censeo Chicago esse delendam
