we should increase the estate tax

would you rather be taxed on money you earn now, or money after you are dead? that's obvious. even if we had to lower income and other taxes to make up for an estate tax increase, either way we should increase taxes on estate taxes. 

it should go without saying, we need to do something to keep our debt manageable and this would help, especially if we didn't offset increasing estate taxes with lowering other taxes. 

I disagree with this, as it causes, in the long run, for land and the means of production to shift from private control to corporate control. If a small farm is to stay in the family, the owners have to pay an estate tax on it every time that a family member dies. In a high volume, low margin business like farming, this means that farmers often have to sell off some of their land each generation in order to survive. Since corporations are essentially fake people who never die, they don't have to do this and so, over time, they accumulate more and more land. Corporate control of agricultural land leads to fragile supply chains, monocultures, overuse of herbicides, corruption, and other deleterious effects (not to mention an ever tightening death-grip on an essential good). The law shouldn't favor corporate ownership over small businesses; it should do the exact opposite.

I'm against any form of inheritance tax. The country needs the kinds of people that will produce more than they themselves use for it to function. One of the motivator for people to produce more is the idea that they can hand it off to their children. The children generally squander a good deal of this inheritance which means that extra production goes back into the economy. This means that wealth is added to the nation. Having an inheritance tax means the father has zero incentive to leave anything behind as the state will confiscate most of it and his kids get nothing anyway. This causes the farther to produce way less that he otherwise would have. And this wealth is subtracted from the nation.

The exemption is currently 11.88 million. Exactly how many small farmers meet this threshold? Under the previous exemption of 5.45 million, only 0.4 of small business farmers had to pay any estate tax.

Most people don't know how to use trusts to avoid estate taxes. Estate taxes are a tool to suppress poor people and ignorant people.

It's not a fair tax at all, and anyone that supports it is either rich or a sheep.

I think it's BS. You pay tax every year, your family shouldn't have to pay to inherit it. A nice acre property with a trailer shouldn't be taxed cause guys like Trump leave stuff to heirs too. 

Only federal estate taxes are capped that high, state estate taxes are usually much lower (though thankfully many of these have been repealed). What it does is put an upper size ceiling on privately owned farms which doesn't exist for corporations. This gives the corporation leverage over the private owner. They don't even have to own the land, they can use economic pressures to reduce the modern equivalent of a yeoman farmer to the modern equivalent of a serf. It isn't just about ownership, but about structural power. Look at the demographics in farming, Farms are getting bigger. Land is getting more expensive. That ceiling is going to get tighter and tighter, especially since there's a coming population crunch in rural America. Any family-owned farm which gets too big will bump up against that ceiling, and big ag corporations will always be there ready to squash any challenger to their influence.

I think the US can increase taxes at Canadian levels because, you should admit it, there is no risk to do that.

Where would Americans go if they don't like the measure? Canada? It's too cold. Mexico? So many drug dealers, criminals and poverty. Europe? Too far.

Il Diavolo

Canadians don't have guns either, so the government can collect whatever the Canadian public will bear, until they have yellow shirt protests like in France.

The estate tax may certainly impede growth of a farm. But frankly, a farm that is worth more than the exemption can hardly be considered small. Additionally a farmer with such a large amount of assets should have the foresight and the subsequent liquidity to plan ahead for the estate tax. It's not necessary to sell off land every generation. Just make sure that further land acquisitions are made with careful consideration to all the taxes that are required, including the estate tax.

That aside, the fact remains that it affects an incredibly small amount of farmers. When considering the negatives and positives as a whole, raising the estate tax remains a huge positive in terms of generation of tax dollars. In addition, it helps prevent dynasties of wealthy families such as the Waltons and equalises the disparities between the rich and the poor. These positives certainly outweigh the negatives.

very well argued. you get an A+

how exactly would an estate tax suppress the poor? you say a lot of cockamamie, off the wall, deflective stuff 

Read the post above mine. It explains how the rich can hold property in perpetuity through trusts and corporations while family owned land is given the royal shaft.

The rich are smart enough to manipulate the jealousy of the common man to work in their favor. Who do you think actually makes the regulations and the laws ultimately? Who do you trust?

well as dust was arguing, none of the people who are affected by estate taxes are poor. they might be a family farm, but they are a wealthy family farm. 

so what? why do you want elite politicians bought by rich people to manipulate you using your jealousy? Who do you trust?

You don't really believe politicians do you when they say they care about you? Money talks and bullshit walks. What's in your wallet Capital One?

You know what's not fair? I work my butt off to get what I get and trust fund baby over there got millions and didn't do shit.

So you just admitted that my argument was correct. It means that privately owned farms will never be big enough to challenge, economically, corporate power. And I have relatives who are very, very wealthy. They don't pay estate taxes on the huge majority of their wealth because, as Grey Parrot has said, it's held in trusts and corporations (or just offshored). The estate tax is a tax on the middle and upper middle classes. It is a barrier to wealth mobility, not a tax on wealth. It ensures that the richest families stay rich, with many ways to dodge the tax, while anyone rising up in wealth gets taken out at the kneecaps because they do not have enough resources to navigate the system. As I pointed out, agriculture is low margin, high volume. It's very heard to pay a huge estate or gift tax when you have such thin wiggle room.

Stupid, if you have any kind of money or property. Rich or poor. You pay estate tax. 

So what, whiny ass. 

You think fairness doesn't matter? What planet are you from?

Your jealousy is appreciated. 

Fixed.

Lol whatever makes you happy dealing with your jealousy. Someone else out producing you.. and then setting the entire thing on fire if they so chose to do that shouldn't cause you to lose one minute of sleep.. unless you were all eaten up on the inside with jealousy.

You really think is not a fair tax? How could you believe such a thing when inheritance is inherently an unfair thing. People acquiring vast wealth without doing anything to earn it isn't fair.

Changing the subject is dropping the argument and amounts to conceding the point. That's how I'm going to interpret what you're doing.

Again, your issue is with a rich person just throwing away all his hard earned money to his useless unproductive children.

That is textbook jealousy. Why do you get to decide what a person wants to do with the things he makes?

Also, why on earth would you assume an unproductive child getting unearned wealth from his parents a good thing? In many cases, the child leads a destructive short and painful life. The internet has thousands of examples of destroyed lives from lottery winners who suddenly came into unearned wealth and then destroyed themselves. Are you really sorry for these inheritees, or just jealous?

And no it's not a fair tax when corporations and people wealthy enough to offshore their assets are exempt and middle class families are not.

Why do you think these "woke" billionaires like to influence government? Who do you think is really in control here? It certainly aint the common man.

Corporations don't die. Estate tax loopholes should be closed. Their existence makes it unfair as between those who should be subject to the tax but aren't and those who are paying the tax. It doesn't make the tax itself unfair. Middle class families are exempt from the estate tax.

They come across as cowardly, vain and insincere. With the Koch brothers you know where they stand.

Many of the state estate taxes have exemptions in the 1-3 million dollar range. This means that any middle class family which is gaining money and might be able to move into the upper classes will have a huge chunk taken out of their wealth if the patriarch/matriarch of the family dies. And as you pointed out, corporations don't die, so this directly incentivizes corporate ownership instead of human proprietorship. In my book, things which erect a barrier to class mobility while encouraging corporate power are never good. I think that tariffs combined with equity taxes would be much more fair across the board, as tariffs punish the offshoring of productive capital and equity taxes cut broadly across corporate and personal wealth. This is why the ruling global capitalist class (and the media mouthpieces which they own) clamor obsessively against both proposals.