Why So Many People Care About the Estate Tax

Now I’ll add another proposition: Society does not have an interest in your desire to ensure that your children are better off than other children. I understand that you have a great interest in this matter. I applaud the tireless work you put in to this end. But society’s job is all children, not specific children who are lucky enough to have hit the genetic lottery. And its aim should be for a society of equal opportunity to succeed and get rich. So once you’ve died, and no longer have property rights society needs to protect, there’s no particular moral precept that points toward helping your children inherit. On a moral level, I’d be perfectly comfortable with a 100% tax on anything you haven’t passed on before your death.

Now we’ll add in a policy reason for the estate tax: Without it, inheritance becomes a mass tax-avoidance scheme. While the owners were living, their assets piled up capital gains. If they’d sold them while they were alive, they’d have to pay taxes on those gains. But when people die, the estate system does something called “stepping up the basis” of those assets, which in plain English, means that the assets are revalued to today’s price, so that when the heirs sell them, they only have to pay the difference between the asset’s value when they inherited, and the asset’s value when they sell. Since today’s value is generally higher than it was whenever Grandma bought that stock, painting, or piece of land, this is a very valuable bit of tax avoidance.

So society has a right and a reason to tax estates.

Of course, there are also reasons to be modest in our estate-taxing ambitions (and the U.S. certainly is, which is one reason that so few estates pay it). People will work hard to pass on their wealth to their children, and that work has spillover benefits for the rest of us. A lot of rich folks are doing unglamorous things like running fast-food-franchise operations, building homes, and manufacturing plumbing supplies. As they near their golden years, those folks might well be tempted to slack off if they knew that any further work would benefit strangers instead of their children.

Properly modest inheritance-taxing ambitions don’t have to take the form of an estate tax. We could get rid of the estate tax if we also got rid of the basis step-up. The step-up made sense in the days when ownership records often consisted of little pieces of paper that Grandma had lying around in her attic from who-knows-when. But major financial assets like land, securities and often even art now have good, easily accessible records of who purchased them and when. We could improve the quality of record-keeping by putting the burden on the inheritor: “Don’t have a record? Too bad, you’ll be taxed on this $1 million painting as though Grandma paid $0.”

Or we could keep the somewhat illogical system we have. What we shouldn’t do is follow the Republican plan of making large tax-free gifts to the children of very rich people. Or, for that matter, the Democratic plan of getting hysterical about the estate tax all out of proportion to its actual importance.

— Read How to Avoid Extra Taxes When Clients Avoid Marriage on ThinkAdvisor.