tech- to have capital gains taxes ..you have to sell assets...to be able to buy items such as land etc ..you had to have income that already was taxed..with capital gains there is also a risk of capital loss..tech, yes they can transfer large amounts of unrealized capital gains now, but as soon as they sell them it will be taxed ...why cant libs wait..

Techfan is simply one of those who feels that the government should seize private individuals' property and assets upon their death. He has obviously never been through an estate settlement. Here is the bottom line. If you inherit an estate next year that is worth $1 million, by the time you pay 55% inheritance tax, executor or lawyer fees or both, appraiser fees, and real estate commissions and/or auction fees from having to sell the propterty and equipment to pay the taxes, probably selling it for less than it was worth because of the time limit to pay the taxes, YOU WILL BE LUCKY TO CLEAR 25% of the estate's value. The Death TAX costs you 75% of the estate and if it was a farm of small business you have also lost all of the future income you might have made.

Any Death TAX is simply insane for estates at $1 million dollars and a 55% Death TAX is totally unreasonable for ANY estate value.

i grew up in iowa what you are saying is factually in accurate..and if it affects just 2 or 3 percent it is too many, even if effect just one its way too many. we have cut capital gains far b/4 2001 and its because of inflation.. ..it is not i repeat, not the govt business what i leave my family...its already been taxed....

JD raises a point I was going to as well, about incentives to work and innovate vs handouts. Even Ayn Rand was down on inherited wealth, saying the only person who merited inheritance was the person who wouldn't need it to succeed in the first place.

It doesn't address the moral standpoint, but from a thriving economic standpoint, I have to take JD's side in this. Decrease reliance on inherited wealth and you get more Bill Gates. Increase reliance on inherited wealth and you get more Paris Hiltons.

If you have valuable timber land....give it to your children before you die.....

Why are the left so hateful to successful people "since it only affects 2% of the people...screw them!" I thought the left fought for the minorities? What happened to that?

And Jane.... You said "Still no need to hoard it all to give the kids million dollar inheritances they didn't work for and won't really appreciate in the long run."

So how is it morally superior for the government to take that money and give it to people that didn't work for it and won't really appreciate it in the long run?

http://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/tax-tips/Tax-Planning-and-Checklist...

Jane doe...please show where I stated any loathing for the poor......or are you just making up things I said?

....I'm sure whatever disdain we may have for the slothful, it's nowhere NEAR the absolute and incendiary, burning hatred that you "proggies " have for the wealthy...after all, in YOUR minds they didn't earn it right? They obviously "stole it from the workers and the poor",so your confiscatory death taxes are just "leveling the playing field" right....?
Envy is such and ugly, ugly emotion.... and the left's manifestation of this envy is even uglier....

Funny that some revere those woeful ugly envious Marxist Founding Fathers.

"With Thomas Jefferson taking the lead in the Virginia legislature in 1777, every Revolutionary state government abolished the laws of primogeniture and entail that had served to perpetuate the concentration of inherited property. Jefferson cited Adam Smith, the hero of free market capitalists everywhere, as the source of his conviction that (as Smith wrote, and Jefferson closely echoed in his own words), "A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural." Smith said: "There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death."

"The states left no doubt that in taking this step they were giving expression to a basic and widely shared philosophical belief that equality of citizenship was impossible in a nation where inequality of wealth remained the rule. North Carolina's 1784 statute explained that by keeping large estates together for succeeding generations, the old system had served "only to raise the wealth and importance of particular families and individuals, giving them an unequal and undue influence in a republic" and promoting "contention and injustice." Abolishing aristocratic forms of inheritance would by contrast "tend to promote that equality of property which is of the spirit and principle of a genuine republic.""

http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2010/10/estate_tax_and_founding...

"All Property, indeed, except the Savage’s temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it."
--Benjamin Franklin

"legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. The descent of property of every kind therefore to all the children, or to all the brothers and sisters, or other relations in equal degree is a politic measure, and a practicable one. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise."
-- Thomas Jefferson; Letter to James Madison, (Oct. 28, 1785)

"Admitting that any annual sum, say, for instance, one thousand pounds, is necessary or sufficient for the support of a family, consequently the second thousand is of the nature of a luxury, the third still more so, and by proceeding on, we shall at last arrive at a sum that may not improperly be called a prohibitable luxury."
-- Thomas Paine, 'Rights of Man, Part the Second'

"The great object should be to combat the evil: 1. By establishing a political equality among all; 2. By witholding unnecessary opportunities from a few to increase the inequality of property by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches; 3. By the silent operation of laws which, without violating the rights of property, reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort; 4. By abstaining from measures which operate differently on different interests, and particularly such as favor one interest at the expense of another; 5. By making one party a check on the other so far as the existence of parties cannot be prevented nor their views accommodated. If this is not the language of reason, it is that of republicanism."
-- James Madison; from 'Parties' (1792)

....it should NOT give the state the right to stick their hands in MY pocket YET AGAIN after I'm gone.....
..I for one, resent being taxed when I earn it, taxed when I spend it and then yet again taxed when I leave it....I mean really....when is enough ENOUGH!!....
I'm TOLD, (not even asked) that I should hand over willingly what I worked for, and if I don't I'm somehow greedy, but those who receive what I worked for without so much as an acknowledgement that it was confiscated are NOT?.....
Sorry, but yes....it DOES make me feel better about myself to care about the legacy I leave my heirs rather than the EBT cards left to the moochers, leeches and parasites that will slowly kill the "host" that is productive America....