Quote:
Originally posted by Connect_the_Dots
As a percentage, an estate of 1-2 million or so will have a lot of wealth eaten up in lawyer fees. If the cutoff were higher (10 million?), maybe it wouldn't bother me. But if you have to pay, say, 5% of your estate that is a lot of money, even if it helps to keep you from having to turn over 40% to the government. Paying 5% is better than paying 40, but that still doesn't mean that paying the 5% is "fair".
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Sure. Paperwork costs are regressive. But again I ask what's new? That's true of the income tax too. My parents spent a chunk on lawyer fees to get an estate plan. But the chunk was a lot smaller than the money it will save once they're both dead (unless my mom dies in 2010, in which case the fees will have been a waste).
And really you don't need a lot of the advanced techniques with GST and whatnot unless you've got a huge load. The pretty basic credit trust will should be able to be generated for not more than a couple of Gs.
And if you want to raise the floor, I'm all for that. In fact, the current law provides for that even in advance of 2010. But that doesn't justify a repeal.
There's a decent moral argument to be made for a complete repeal of the estate tax. And there's a decent moral argument to retain it. I can't say which one is right, and probably no one can. But to dress up a repeal as justified by farmers, paperwork, or small businesses is fundamentally disingenuous. Although not surprisingly, it enjoys 70% support among those who have no hope of being subject to the estate tax, even as currently written.
