:-)


I think I've plowed this ground before, but to briefly recap. My views are:


1) Vast accumulated wealth is bad for society. It gives too much power over long periods of time to families. It removes incentives for following generations to create new wealth (they instead spend their time protecting what Great Grandpa created). It helps create an aristocracy of wealth in a country that is supposed to be egalitarian.

That will always exist on some scale in any society where some people have more stuff than other people. You cannot legislate or tax it away. Well, you can; we call it "North Korea".
2) Those who have vast fortunes (the top fraction of 1%) are in a much better position to pay a fair share of the costs of society than someone in, say, the bottom 25% of incomes. The rich have much more invested in the society than the poor, as TR pointed out, so they should be willing to pay more to help lift society as a whole.

The rich, generally speaking, have much more invested offshore than the poor. In fact, your paragraph here is positively socialist; I thought the "American Way" was "Pay Your Way"?
3) In the US, very few estates are taxed as it is, yet it's an important source of revenue for the Federal government. If inheritance taxes are abolished, that money has to come from somewhere.

In the UK, a paltry \ufffd3.6B was raised from inheritance tax last year - the square root of fuck all, in government accountancy terms. By contrast, some \ufffd80B was wasted by the government. What's that about tails, dogs and the wagging thereof?
4) Few, in the US anyway, are talking about some sort of leveling tax that cedes huge fortunes directly to the US Treasury. That's certainly not what I'm looking for. I think a graduated rate peaking at something like the top marginal Federal Income Tax rate would be fair; kicking in at say $5M or $10M or $50M or so.


I don't see inheritance taxes as "double taxation" and I don't see it as unfair. We can argue about what level of estate should be taxed, and we can argue about the rate, but I think the idea of an estate tax is a good one and it should be maintained.

It's double taxation (a tax on stuff just cuz) whether you see it as that or not.
I don't find arguments like, "The rich have lawyers and accountants so they can get out of it, so no-one should have to pay it" to be persuasive. Tighten the loopholes, don't throw out the tax. We don't abolish sales taxes because people don't pay them at yard sales, or don't pay them when they visit their drug dealer, for example.

What have informal yard sales and illegal narcotics transactions got to do with sales tax?