Wouldn't that inspire the wealthy to spend up the money prior to dying? If it can't go to your kids, then they'd be forced to put it back into the economy, wouldn't they? I may be with MSF on this one. Zero taxes on an estate passed to a spouse – a cool buttload for the kids.

The basic premise of my split on this issue is class building. You are totally right about spousal survivorship (I forgot to mention that earlier). However, when you have generation after generation building up wealth through little work on their own part, you grow an aristocracy. I just can't help feeling way down in my gut that people should all have the same opportunities. I sound very much like a Democrat when I say that (cause I am one), but I truly believe that Donald Trump's kids should have the same opportunities that mine do. His kids can go to a better college than mine already. Why should they also have the benefit of their dad's wealth that they didn't earn?

Maybe the “everything that doesn't go to charity” is a bit much; but our nation as a whole would benefit from something to level the playing field somehow.

I guess for now I'll sit the fence a bit longer until either side convinces me; or until someone comes up with a better plan.

We shouldn't use a death tax to make right the other wrongs in our system. I'd rather see taxes double on the wealthy than hide it in a death tax. At least we are being honest about it.

The baseline question of whether or not there should be a death tax, estate tax, etc in the first place is a separate one. Is it, as I've often thought, a case of the govt. taxing money which has already been taxed right down the line just because it changed hands inside the family? If you look at it from that point of view, then the tax itself is an insult. I suppose others feel, though, that the children have no legal claim on the wealth amassed by their parents, so it comes to them as some sort of “gift” or “windfall profit” and the govt. should be able to tax it again. I can't say that opinion is entirely wrong. I just don't happen to agree with it.

But either way, saying that the govt. should get everything that doesn't go to charity is, in my view, insane.

Educated me on something. I've heard the argument against the Death Tax. At one time I agreed with most of those arguments. I realize that liberals don't care about fairness of estates – they just want the tax money to fund government growth. With that said……

I have been thinking that perhaps your estate should not freely go to your children. All that does is prevent them from making their own way in the world with an unfair advantage over their competition. Now I'm against the government getting their hands on it because, like your children, they did not earn it either.

What would be the fair “middle ground” for this? Would it be that, unless you give it all to charity (which I support); then the government gets it all minus funeral expenses?

I don't know. Like I said…. Educate me.

(Try for a moment, here in 21st century America, to imagine a Congress that told the public that it needed a new tax to pay for a pressing, specific need and then removed the tax once the need was met. Man, those guys really were revolutionary, weren’t they?)

That was Thomas Jefferson.

A major difference between Jefferson and modern “conservatives” was that Jefferson actually believed in paying his debts, rather than enslaving future generations to pay for our inability to either raise taxes or cut spending. Or, as he put it:

If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, and give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; And the sixteen being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they do now, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; But be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains around the necks of our fellow sufferers; And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second, that second for a third, and so on 'til the bulk of society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering…and the forehorse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.