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Originally Posted by mcsluggo
I'm sorry but it is beyond obvious that when you are dead you are beyond taxation. You are taxing the RECIPIENTS of the wealth, of course.
Why on earth would people in principle not be opposed to taxing the receipt of $40,000 from a year's work, but in principle be opposed to the receipt of $100,000,000 because somebody else has died?
from an an economic effeciency standpoint it makes no sense. Are we going to affect the incentives to die? ... in what sense DOES the opposition to estate taxes (relative to other forms of taxation) make sense? I just don't see this one AT ALL.
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You'd get it, if you'd get over the notion that taxation is a tool for affecting behavior. It's not. It's a funding source, plain and simple.
Why are you taxing the assets of the dead, which have already been taxed while they were being earned & acquired during the dead dude's lifetime? The government already got their cut, why do they need to double dip?
Inheritance is a private exchange of private property. It's not the product of commerce or labor or anything else. There's no exchange of goods or services in the transaction. There's no profit on top of cost. It's a gift. Private exchanges of private property should be untouchable by the government, in principle.
In fact, I'm positive that the government sleeps on billions every year in cash transactions for goods & services rendered that aren't trackable. So again, I ask, why are we sweating over 12,000 private exchanges of private property? Politics. That's all. An easy money grab and a dig at the affluent.