As a Dolphins fan (shhh, don't tell anyone) who loves the Steelers and their legacy, I've been following this topic with interest for some time, and here's an excellent, excellent (short) commentary in the Wall Street Journal. In the most simple sense, the author explains that:

With the team's value estimated at $700 million or more, the 45% federal death tax rate could put each brother on the hook to the IRS for tens of millions of dollars.

That may be more than they can afford. NFL franchises have appreciated quickly in the past decade, and the more a franchise goes up in value, the greater the challenge for estate planning. While a given brother's share of the team may be worth more than $100 million on paper, that doesn't mean he or his heirs have half again that much in cash to fork over to the IRS.

Government authoritarians have always insisted that the rich get richer without estate taxes, and the middle class and poor only get poorer. But the poor can't get any poorer by not sharing in something that was not their own in the first place. Government social engineers and welfarists intend to redistribute to the waiting masses via taxing a wealthy individual's death, but all they do is open up the sweet pot to those who have the resources to access it - individuals or groups with political power and/or financial clout.

The reality is that family-owned businesses and their living owners - sons and daughters and grandkids - get punished for inheriting and running a business, and oftentimes have to bail out of the business in order to cover the taxes. So then, who are the beneficiaries of these draconian taxes? As the author points out, this oppressive taxation has been good for the rich, especially concerning cash cow media conglomerates and hedge funds.

Of course, the estate tax is also what has forced the sale of so many family-owned local newspapers to the "media giants" that liberals who love the estate tax now deplore. Those rare papers that are still family owned know the death tax is a threat to their longevity. Seattle Times owner Frank Blethen has made the issue a personal crusade as his paper competes with the Hearst-owned Post-Intelligencer (which unsurprisingly favors the estate tax in editorials).

So the rich not only benefit directly from the fire sales of inheritors unable to pay taxes, but they also have the power and money to lobby for the continuance of the government policies that make them wealthier. The author also notes that hedge-fund billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller is sniffing around in Pittsburgh, hoping that he can snatch up the Steelers because the Rooney brothers will be financially unable to maintain ownership of the great team built by their father.

Art Rooney, born and raised in Pennsylvania, spent decades using his wealth to directly benefit his community, his college, and the NFL, but now the "unintended consequences" of the government's social engineering will likely take the team he built away from his family, and put it into the hands of vultures waiting in the wings. The notion of unintended consequences, by the way, is BS. Every action, every power grab, every diktat on the part of government power brokers is fully intended to do what it does: take responsibility, decision-making, wealth, and choice away from the individual and families, and hand it over to chosen recipients so that they can all benefit at the expense of those who are taxed in order to fund the enduring system of corruption and theft. But those who are stolen from don't have the wealth, power, or political position to fight back and keep what is theirs. What they do have is strength in numbers, and the promise of Revolution (think Ron Paul) to take back their lives and their property.