Boston ? I always knew Americans were an optimistic lot. This is, after all, the Lake Wobegon democracy where all the children are above average. I just never realized how many above-average Americans thought we were millionaires.

This bulletin from the financial subconscious comes from a survey that asked Americans whether they or some member of their immediate family would have to pay an estate tax. Thirty-seven percent said yes. Even after the researchers explained that the current tax applied only to estates worth more than $1 million, 30 percent raised their hands.

Now maybe these cockeyed optimists have a lottery ticket in the desk drawer. Maybe they’re counting on a spin-off of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” But fewer than 2 percent of estates will in fact fall into the taxable range. I’m afraid some folks are going to be very disappointed when grandma’s will is read.

This musing on the American mindset comes as we complete yet another round of wrangling about what’s called the “death tax.” It was given this nickname by opponents trying (successfully, alas) to portray the federal taxman as a grim reaper chopping financial limbs off of warm corpses.

The estate tax needed some fixing. But opponents led by the owners of such mom-and-pop businesses as Mars candy and Gallo wine began lobbying to do away with it altogether.

Last year, they got what they wanted. Sort of. Congress voted to gradually raise the exemption to $3.5 million, and then eliminate the tax altogether in 2010, and then, after a year ta da! resurrect the tax in its original form.

If you don’t understand this, well, as George Bush said in Iowa, “It’s hard for me to explain why.” It was an accounting fandango that would make Arthur Andersen jealous.

The result was a law both absurd and uncertain. The tax-free year 2010 became known as the year to “throw momma from the train.” Quick, before the tax comes back.

Predictably, a cry went out for a permanent and total end to the estate tax. Republicans like Pennsylvania’s Sen. Rick Santorum, ever sensitive to the pain of the rich, even suggested that anyone who voted against repeal would be responsible for suicide of untold millionaires.

But last Wednesday, after more fancy footwork in the Senate, the question was pushed off for another year. So, it appears we have one more chance, one more election cycle, to try and talk sensibly about death and taxes, finances and, um, aristocracy.

First, some finances to counter fantasies. More than half of the money grimly reaped by the federal tax collector actually comes from estates worth more than $5 million. Opponents insist that small family farms are being lost to the tax collector. But when a reporter went to Iowa last year in search of this mythical victim, even the Farm Bureau couldn’t find one.

Repealing the estate tax permanently would cost the government an estimated $740 billion in the decade after 2010 the peak baby boomer retirement years. Maybe the optimists plan to retire on their million-dollar inheritance, but the rest of us should worry about the public coffers of Social Security and Medicare.

And before we count on private charity, well, in 1999 about $15 billion in charitable giving was due to the estate tax.

There are the reform proposals offering a more balanced as in balanced budget approach. If we simply kept a $3.5 million exemption, only the 6,000 wealthiest estates worth an average, astronomical $17 million would be taxed. Class warfare? I don’t think so.

I have never understood why the “death tax” is a popular rather than a populist issue. Contrary to what you’ve heard, you can’t take it with you.

Parents who work and save should be able to leave money to their children. Over the next 50 years, the transfer of wealth from one generation to the next is projected to reach between $41 trillion and $136 trillion. But should those who work for money pay taxes, while those who inherit millions pay none?

The first estate tax was written into law in 1916 in response to the excesses of the Gilded Age. Americans were uneasy about inequality and about an inherited aristocracy. We have every reason to be uneasy again.

One reformer figured out that repealing the tax would save the estate of Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling some $55 million when he dies. Do 30 percent of Americans think old Jeff is going to leave the family fortune to them?

Ellen Goodman is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.