I am more comfortable with people who accumulated their wealth deciding how to spend it than the US Congress.
This argument could be taken more seriously if the threshold was $135 million, rather than $3.5 million. I suspect there are more than just a "few" families with estates at $3.5+ million.
Hating the wealthy and wishing to punish them - these are twin tenets of the socialist mindset. Never mind that the vast majority of these people worked like dogs all their lives to set aside something for their families, all the while paying income taxes, capital gains taxes, corporate taxes, and a whole laundry list of other taxes, while, at the same time, drawing far less on the government teat than most others.
You can fund a socialist regime by penalizing the wealthy, but once there are no more wealthy, then who pays for your socialist regime?
The only way to guarantee a prosperous nation is for government to get off the backs of businesses with extensive deregulation, and to put its own house in order with responsible and frugal economic and fiscal policy. Nothing else will work. Period. No matter how much fun it may be for socialist ghouls and goblins to kick the corpses of those who worked hard and maintained well their families and their society.
If the people of a society don’t have the character to resist baying after the belongings of others, then it is up to government to restrain them; anything less is simpy mob rule, which is clearly the direction in which the United States is headed; indeed, such mob rule is the ultimate fate of every nation which opts for a socialist government.
No stepping the way up through generations to the circles of the elite because the step is cut away at the first generation.The real effect of the death tax is to make sure those at the bottom, stay at the bottom.
A dollar is taxed one time. The death tax “taxes” it again. This is not Constitutional. It is far past the time to do some serious house cleaning of our governing agencies.