It has been said that the only things certain in life, are death and taxes. Yet, for those that stand to inherit bucketloads of money we do so find that the current exemption, as of 2023, is $12.92 million for an estate of a single individual, and thus the current exemption for a married couple is an astonishing $25.84 million. This signifies, that for those that are married and have assets of nearly $26 million that they are able to thus legally pass that wealth onto their progeny, with no estate tax being assessed against those inheritors, whatsoever. Further to the point, those that have estates far exceeding $26 million, have no doubt, created tax strategies that will enable that money to be designated to individuals and organizations with an absolute minimum of estate taxation being assessed against it. That is to say, we read at cnbc.com, that “Just 0.2% of U.S. adults who die have owed estate tax in recent years… …That’s lower than the historical 1% to 2% share.” In fact, cnbc.com, tells us, that there were only “… 2,570 taxable estate-tax returns filed in 2019.”
When a country is too frightened or too stupid to tax the very entities that have all of the money in the first place, it is only fair to assume that those that are our legislative representatives in this nation, have themselves been “captured” by the superrich. After all, think about it, the amount of people that have assets greater than $26 million are all people that are in the upper decimal of the top 1% of such familial wealth accumulated in the United States. The bottom line, is about half of the people in the United States, have no net worth, which would seem to indicate that they would appreciate the superrich, coughing up a heck of a lot more of their wealth, upon their demise, so as to redistribute such to those that really need it, in the present.
It would be one thing if in this modern age, America was becoming a nation in which its labor class was capturing a fair share of what they so produced for those that they work for – but in actuality, the labor class, has been steadily losing ground in the 21st century and that ground has been almost exclusively lost to those that are the superrich or well off, instead. This means that the superrich as things are so currently structured, have never had more money in their hands, then they so have today; and somehow, for whatever spurious reasoning, they are being taxed at historic low rates on not only an annual basis, but also upon their death.
A nation that won’t tax the superrich appropriately when they are amongst the living, and insists upon not taxing them upon their death, is a nation that has no interest, whatsoever, in seeing that there is a process in place to accord a fairer distribution of the wealth, of this country. Those then, that truly believe that wealth concentration is good for a nation and its people, have surely got it all wrong – for that is the very thing that Europe was known for, before America rose up to assert its independence, back in 1776. Yet, regrettably, America has itself become a nation of dynastic wealth, so having been accomplished upon the backs of its own working class.