XBradTC

Via John F. DeLio’s Facebook page.

Currently, the estate tax exemption per individual for 2016 is $5.45 million. For a married couple, after the death of the second spouse, that amounts to a total exemption of $10.9 million.  That’s right smack in the heart of a successful small business or farm.

I used to make a lot of money working with families to mitigate the harm the estate tax would do to their families. There’s an entire industry devoted to that.  Between paying lawyers and those of us in the financial industry considerable sums, they could, with some care, completely avoid paying any estate tax.  So the government got nothing. But the capital of the families was reduced by the regulatory burden of having to mitigate government interference with their livelihoods.

Finally, the estate tax is perhaps the most clear case of the government mentality that all wealth belongs to the state eventually, and the citizen is merely allowed to have some small share of it some of the time.