Whether I admired George Steinbrenner or loathed him (his kind treatment of troubled souls like Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden won me over in his later years), say this for the man: he had impeccable timing.

When Steinbrenner led a group of partners who bought the New York Yankees in 1973 for $10 million, the team was down on its luck and owned by a parent company, CBS, which had no idea what to do about it.

When he died on July 13 at age 80, he had built his own network, YES, on the cornerstone of a personal fortune estimated at $1.1 billion. (1) The Yankees franchise is reportedly worth another $1.6 billion, but most of it was allegedly pledged as collateral for loans that financed the team’s new stadium. In any case, we must treat all of these values ​​as little more than conjecture, since no outsider can gauge the current value of the privately owned Yankee empire, nor are we privy to the details of the Steinbrenner family’s business arrangements.

We know this: By dying in 2010, a year in which the United States has no estate taxes, Steinbrenner could have saved his family $600 million in debt to the US Treasury. Or maybe not. His death illustrates why I believe the estate tax is so arbitrary and fundamentally unfair that it should be permanently eliminated. Under current law, the tax will return in force next year, in the form of a 55 percent rate and a lifetime exemption of just $1 million per person.

The Boss is survived by his wife Joan, four children (including two sons, Hank and Hal, who have been active in the Yankees’ front office), and several grandchildren.

The family faces potential tax disaster if Steinbrenner leaves everything to his wife. There will be no taxes due now, but estate tax will be due, potentially at that 55 percent rate, within nine months of Joan Steinbrenner’s death if she dies in 2011 or later. Unless the family has around $600 million at the time, the YES network may need to be mortgaged or sold to pay the bill. (To be fair, in some circumstances the government will provide low-interest financing for the estate tax when the majority of the estate consists of illiquid business.)

The family would also likely face a large and expensive legal battle with the government over the fair market value of the media empire. The government, it goes without saying, will think the Steinbrenner estate is worth lots of money. The family will point to complex ownership structures, business uncertainties and economic conditions to argue for a lower value. Absent an actual transaction, a sale by YES or the Yankees to a third party, no one can be sure. Then the two parties can fight in court.

That’s what happened to the estate of newspaper magnate SI Newhouse, who died in 1979. Four years later, the IRS sued for $914 million in additional taxes, penalties and interest, alleging the family grossly underestimated the value of the properties. Newhouse companies.

After an epic and costly legal battle, the family won it all, but it required extensive resources and seven years of court wrangling. (2) The survivors of small-scale entrepreneurs often lack both the money and the stomach for that kind of all-out war with a government that believes it has the right both to measure a person’s lifetime wealth and to take the half of her

Ultimately, the estate tax is not the “inheritance tax” that your political opponents like to claim it to be. George Steinbrenner is dead, and he won’t know or care what taxes his estate ultimately generates. The wealth tax is a savings tax, a success tax, a legacy tax. It is a tax imposed only on those who would enjoy, maintain or take advantage of the achievements of a previous generation.

Steinbrenner might have cashed in in 1980, when he had already made the Yankees champions again through a combination of his extremely hands-on management and his ability to pick the right free agents to spend his partnership money on. He could have cashed in in 2000, when he turned that early success into a new dynasty that won four championships in five years and produced a core of stars that still stands out today.

Rather than take his winnings and retire, or dissipate his wealth through indolence, speculation, or charity, Steinbrenner opted to double down on the Yankees franchise by creating YES and building a new stadium in the Bronx. Not many successful media franchises have been built in the last decade, but YES is one of them.

And for the record: Steinbrenner’s Yankees sent eight representatives to the All-Star game last night; their rivals across town, the Mets, who play in the same media-rich market, sent two.

An estate tax would force Steinbrenner’s family to buy back from the government everything Steinbrenner built during his lifetime. I think that’s wrong, and it seems like a lot of people intuitively agree. Supporters of the estate tax, which has never affected more than a small fraction of American households, often lament the number of people who oppose the tax even if they never pay it. They believe that these “inheritance tax” opponents are being manipulated and misled. I think the public is much smarter than that, and smart enough to cringe at the idea of ​​the government claiming half of any company simply because a man died.

I assume the Steinbrenner family advisers have already considered what to do in the event of The Boss’s death this year. They can advise Joan Steinbrenner to give up most of her inheritance, in order to let the assets pass tax-free to the next generation. They may also advise Steinbrenner’s children to step down in favor of the grandchildren, as the generation-skip transfer tax is also on hiatus this year. In fact, George Steinbrenner’s death may save his family that huge tax bill, but it might take some maneuvering.

There are probably some people, especially in New England, who believe that George Steinbrenner is reason enough to bring back the estate tax. My answer is that if someone is going to decide to break up the Yankees, he shouldn’t be the tax collector.