During the 2016 presidential debate, Hillary Clinton vowed to raise the estate (death) tax to 65%, while Donald Trump pledged to abolish it as part of his overall tax reform proposal. An interesting question resonates as to whether the tax is even constitutional. This paper takes a fresh look at the Estate Tax, appropriate in an era of a U.S. Supreme Court consisting of a majority of adherents to a more “strict constructionist” view of constitutional interpretation. Although historically regarded by the U.S. Supreme Court as being a constitutional excise tax, it can be theorized that the estate tax is an unconstitutional overreach of taxing power by the Federal government and constitutes a “taking” of private property banned by the 5th Amendment. This article directly confronts the constitutionality of the federal Estate Tax from a purely bedrock perspective. To meet this objective, were review the enumerated powers of Federal taxation as allowed by the U.S. Constitution; dissect the scope of the estate tax, to include an analysis of the judicial and legislative history supporting its constitutionality; theorize that the tax does not have a constitutional basis legitimizing its inclusion in the Federal tax code; and conclude that the estate tax violates the U.S. Constitution and should therefore be repealed.

Rapid cycling synchrotrons are used to accelerate high-intensity proton beams to energies of tens of GeV for secondary beam production. After primary beam collision with a target, the secondary beam can be collected, cooled, accelerated or decelerated by ancillary synchrotrons for various applications. In this paper, we first present a lattice for the main synchrotron. This lattice has: (a) flexible momentum compaction to avoid transition and to facilitate RF gymnastics (b) long straight sections for low-loss injection, extraction, and high-efficiency collimation (c) dispersion-free straights to avoid longitudinal-transverse coupling, and (d) momentum cleaning at locations of large dispersion with missing dipoles. Then, we present a lattice for a cooler ring for the secondary beam. The momentum compaction across half of this ring is near zero, while for the other half it is normal. Thus, bad mixing is minimized while good mixing is maintained for stochastic beam cooling.