Greenville Estate Lawyer: “Estate Tax Red Herring #1”
December 18, 2009
This will be an easy one. The argument is rather simple and attempts to pull at your heart strings. “It is immoral to tax people when they die.”
Why is it any more immoral to tax people on assets they own when they die than it is to tax people on their weekly pay checks? Are not taxes the price we pay to live (or die) in a civilized society? Particularly now in our almost bankrupt civilized society? Does this argument also mean that there should be no income tax return filing for the year of death?
Can one tax really be more immoral or moral than another? Doesn’t that sort of depend on who is doing the judging? And to reverse the argument, why is it moral to allow millionaires (and I say millionaires because the estate tax exemption currently exempts estates of $3,500,000.00 or less) to inherit large amounts of assets with no taxes asked?
In my humble opinion (and that’s really all it is), morality is too malleable as a standard for setting tax policy.
Stay tuned for my response to the next red herring argument. “The estate tax taxes assets that have already been taxed.”