As they say, there are only two things certain in life, death and taxes, of which the apparent point of the “step-up in basis” is to circumvent taxes, indefinitely, which is not only very bad tax policy but unfair to the general public in whole. Basically, what the “step-up in basis” represents is that for those that have material assets such as represented by equities and bonds, that upon the death of this personage, the inheritor of that asset, will be stepped up to the fair market value of those assets at the date of the death of the deceased. What this means, therefore, is that no matter how much paper profit the dearly departed has accumulated, which could be in the billions of dollars, the recipient of those assets has no accumulated tax liability because their tax basis has been readjusted to the value of these material assets at death.
Look, there isn't any doubt that the only conceivable champions of this step-up basis, could only be those that believe that dynastic wealth is something that they deeply desire because either they want to receive such themselves, or they want the capability to pass on that wealth to family members without having that accumulated wealth to be fairly taxed. Indeed, to permit those that are no longer among the living, to pass on their wealth at a stepped-up basis will only increase wealth inequality, and will undercut not only our progressive tax code, but will undercut the belief that this should be a country that champions meritocracy as compared to being a country that is an enabler of dynastic wealth, to its own ultimate undoing.
While it is true that nobody happily pays taxes, it has to be said that taxes must be paid, or else there will come that reckoning in which the national debt so incurred cannot be properly serviced and thus the fiscal house of cards collapses. This signifies that the stepped-up basis needs to be seriously amended and thereby to become consistent with what those that are alive are obligated to pay, whenever they sell their assets, and hence upon one's death, taxes should be assessed at a rate consistent with what the selling, or the transfer of those assets, would have represented.
The bottom line is this nation permits those that live here, the opportunity to earn and to make as much money as they are capable of, subject to taxation as authorized by governmental authorities, which they are obligated to pay to that nation which hosts them, and when those that have accumulated massive assets are no longer in this world, then those assets need to be fairly taxed, for whenever they are not, this makes for a nation in which inheritance trumps labor, which is the type of construct that undermines democracy and enhances plutocracy, in its stead, which is not consistent to what this nation was founded upon or its purpose in being; which is why the stepped-up basis should not only be eliminated, but also why the stepped-up basis policy in fundamentally unamerican.