[ottbmare]

Your logic escapes me here. You seem to accept the premise that the government should get some kind of revenue after a person’s death; you are just proposing a different way for Uncle Same to get his hands on that money, treating the death and resultant wealth transfer as capital gains. I reject the notion that the money in an estate, which has already been taxed once as it was earned, should generate any more revenue for the government. Taxing assets at 15% or 28% or 33% is still taxing it at a rate a lot higher than zero.

As things stand now, the death of a rich man generates no revenue for the federal government because rich people are careful to set up trusts to handle their assets. The procedure is complex, with lots of possibilities and variables, and keeps a whole industry of financial planners in business. The system instead ruins family businesses, including family farms.

[Alberta's Child]

My point had nothing to do with the justification for taxation in general. All I'm suggesting is that treating an inheritance no differently than any other taxable transaction under the current tax code as it relates to capital gains is perfectly reasonable. If you want to have a discussion about the wisdom or morality of different types of taxes and/or the applicable tax rates, then that's a whole different story.

I reject the notion that the money in an estate, which has already been taxed once as it was earned, should generate any more revenue for the government.

Understood. You can make the exact same argument against a lot of different taxes on these same grounds. Keep in mind that a capital gains tax is different than other forms of income-based taxation because only the gain is taxed, not the full amount. So if a person died and left an asset worth $X to his heirs, then the capital gains tax would only be paid on the actual gain -- which is $X minus whatever the deceased originally paid for the asset. That way, there is no difference in tax treatment between a person who passes his assets to his heirs and one who sells off his assets one day before he dies.

The system instead ruins family businesses, including family farms.

This is largely a myth -- especially as it pertains to family farms. Farms had been given a special exemption under the estate tax, though certain conditions must be met. One of these conditions was that the "family farm" was not subject to estate taxes -- but only if the heirs who inherited it continued to operate the asset as a farm. If you heard any stories a few years ago about families being "forced to sell their farms to pay estate taxes," it wasn't because of some kind of injustice in the tax code . . . it was because the next generation of those families simply had no interest in running their parents' farms.