Someone already answered this argument. The motivation for wealthy persons to accumulate wealth isn't necessarily good one, so you can't really use that as a justification of estate tax exemptions over lottery tax exemptions. Also, the lottery is held with the explicit intention of having someone win it, so why should the lottery authority's will be thwarted any more than the estate authority's?
Just another way for the government to take peoples money. A person works to build a business and pays taxes all their life and when they die their offspring has to sell the business to pay the taxes . This is truly sad. What is this country becoming? We have a government with an insatiable spending habit. When will the madness end???
Ultimately, the idea of land ownership and inheritance is a bit absurd. We all came from probably one tribe of human beings - considering the exact match of all our mitochondrial DNA. But do we see ourselves as brothers and sisters? Nope. In 100,000 years, the plot of land you own if you could hand it down tax free would either be in the hands of some dweeb who probably has 0.000001% of your DNA in them or some other dweeb who benefited from someone taking the land of one of your decedents hands - fairly or unfairly. I think parents should be able to leave each kid one personal thing tax free. Their house, a car, whatever...except for stock in a company. A single gift, but not an asset. But land doesn't really belong to anyone, no more than a cave belongs to a bear who lives in it.
The lottery is held with the explicit intention of additional revenue for the state. Generally we don't have problems with rich parents giving their kids the best food, schooling, medical, and housing. I think the same moral argument comes in with the lotto comparisons. I don't see any justification for the inheritance to be taxed just as heavily.
I'd be interested in seeing a simulation of your ideal government played out. How much government is too much government?
Folks, while I'll leave my two kids a pretty good estate, it'll be below what is taxable under the estate tax. Wanted to make that clear. But what I also want to make clear is that this country runs on taxes. It's a simple fact. Republicans spout the standard bull **** about not increasing taxes on the rich, even though they are at modern lows right this minute, and refuse to say how they would balance the budget by cutting taxes even further, and why a tax rate that is the same as that under Bill Clinton, when we had incredible prosperity, is "too high." Meanwhile, as I said, the country runs on taxes. They pave our streets, they operate your hospitals, they pay for police and fire departments.They pay for mass transit. They pay for our military, which protects our country, and our allies. We have to have taxes. The estate tax is simply one of many taxes that make up our budget, and if you get rid of it, then the taxes have to come from somewhere else. Republicans don't want a return to the low rates under Bill Clinton, George Bush Sr., and Ronald Reagan. If we go the GOP route, the imbalance of the budget will get even worse, which is exactly what happened under George W. Bush. The estate tax is needed. Sorry, folks. If you are impacted, my apologies, but you have little sympathy from me. I wouldn't object at all to having the total inheritance number increased, but get rid of it? It would be crazy to do so.
If they give it to you, it's a transaction and that transaction is logically taxable. No different than you giving your friend some money. Or giving your employee some money. If gifts weren't taxable, everyone would just have volunteers and conveniently give them gifts.
A government spending more than a TRILLION dollars more than it takes in every year is TOO much government. Between military spending, entitlements, and interest on the debt we are going bankrupt quickly. My ideal government is much smaller with power shifting to the states and local governments.
Personally I would prefer small government everywhere, but I have no problem with powerful state and local governments. If a person doesn't like their state or local government or think they tax too much it is much easier to move to another town or city or even another state that has smaller government than it is to move to another country. I live in a small town and would not consider living in a large city. Along the same lines, I live in Texas and would not live in New York or California.
Then you do not have owneship over your body and mind either. Your body comes from the Earth and when die the elements that make up your body will return to it. Therefore your body and mind belong to the state. It is not yours. You are not an individual. You can not personally own anything, even yourself.
Providing for your kids is handled via the dependent care exemption. Like Major said- the whole system is based around taxing any transaction that realizes value, the dependent care exemption handles the messiness if you applied this too rigorously and had to deal with trying to tax within households. Magically turning people into dependents again to shield them from tax in an estate situation doesn't seem very logical or comoelling policy (or inherently fair to use the word of the day...).
Everything but the state comment would be true. The "State" doesn't really exist. It's just another form of people trying to own something. The existence of the "state" is for our own benefit. A system of control to create rules that everyone abides by. Ownership of property, trade laws, corporation set-up taxes, all of this stuff, is merely the rules we play by and seem to go along with since people or at least the people with power, prefer that over anarchy. True freedom if you think about it, is literally what you wrote, minus the state comment which is actually a type of tyranny. True freedom would be to be someplace like Somalia. Without law. Free to do whatever you want. Love, build, kill, whatever.
Sorry, but the last time I looked, Texas didn't build the Interstate Highway System. And while Texas used to have a state highway system that was the envy of most of the world's countries, much less the states within those countries, I doubt that you recall that state highway system. Why, besides you not being old enough? Because it is a shadow of what it once was, and what new highways we have are generally toll roads, unlike the free highways covering this state that I remember so well. And the Texas Navy is a club now, not a real navy. Maybe you can get a license plate mentioning it, I don't know, but you could look into that. The Texas state militia would have a tough time fighting Canada, if we had the means to move them north to the border. Maybe we could commandeer the public school buses and use them. They aren't air conditioned, but who needs that in Canada anyway? Besides, we'd be heading south soon enough. Joking aside, do you really think about this stuff before you post? Texas is at or near the bottom in a host of metrics. Governor Perry and his Republican Legislature have gutted a host of state programs, and turned up their noses at Federal tax dollars just so they can say they "stuck to their guns." That's Federal tax dollars that you and I paid that don't just go unspent, but go to other states instead of our own. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Oh sure, that's brilliant state government. Hey, I'm glad you live in a small town. I bet your small town has a hospital system just as good as that in Houston at the Medical Center, which gets loads of Federal dollars. Good thing that you don't need it.
Big government needs big money to fund it. Estate tax is a big money maker for the government. Really hurts the middle class more than the rich though.
Not true at all. The vast majority of the Middle Class don't have estates large enough to be affected. Still, as I said before, I wouldn't mind seeing the floor rasied a bit on the estate tax. It could be tweaked.
