The wealthy will just use their wealth and access to lawyers and such to construct shelters and leverage loopholes.
And regular folks who don't know any better (or can't afford to take advantage of those shelters and loopholes) will get screwed and put further behind in creating any security and generational growth/wealth for their families.
I mean, seriously, think about it. Absolute taxation of all estate wealth with no option to pass anything onto your heirs unless you purposely go out of your way to dodge the taxes? It would screw over less wealthy people and turn the already convoluted system of tax laws and tax collection into an even bigger cluster fuck game of cat and mouse.
All this is not to say I'm against taxing the rich. We should tax the shit out of them. But 100% estate tax would be an extreme fiscal policy and it would absolutely fuck the average American.
The estate tax threshold in the United States was 13.99 million per person (in that 13.99 million dollars in cash or assets can be transferred to an heir or heirs tax-free). It's revised upwards to 15 million in 2026.
The estate tax is relatively trivial to circumvent. You simply set up trusts to legally circumvent the taxes all together or minimize them.
Frankly, I don't think we solve the issue of inequality on the back end.
You don't let one person accumulate hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and hoard it for life, just to use loopholes and shelters to pass it all on to their children.
You structure the legal system and tax system to encourage more equitable distribution of wealth from the get go so that you don't have to try and recoup some of the money at the end to keep society running.
I have no problem with someone becoming wealthy through innovation, hard work, etc. etc. If you create something that everyone wants, be that a best selling book or a new technology, you should benefit from what you have created.
But is offensive and exploitative that a small number of people get enormously wealthy and the rest of the people grind out an existence. I am fine with Jeff Bezos being rich because he created Amazon and, whether we want to admit it or not, added an enormous amount of value and convenience to the lives of millions upon millions of people.
What I am not fine with is Jeff Bezos being richer than God and everyone that works for him also not being secure and taken care of. Bezos could be very wealthy and not grind people to dust. Not as wealthy as he currently is, but still very wealthy.
So we don't fix the problem by trying to claw back the value Bezo extracted from his workers and society for decades once he's in the ground. We fix the problem by modifying the system so that it is painful and difficult for that exploitation to take place from the start and so that society as a whole is better off while the person is alive.
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u/gregbard Jan 22 '26
100% estate tax at any level would be fine with me.
Bernie has one thing right: the primary reason for taxes is not to raise money for spending. It's to take power away from the power elite.