| Sumario: | The estate tax should be abolished. The wish to leave an estate is a powerful motive for people to work and save, and estate tax has a correspondingly negative effect on a person's inclination to amass property. The weight of the tax falls primarily on the beneficiary, and consequently it is impossible to reach an unequivocal estimation of the estate's distributional effect. Furthermore, as the tax's encumbrance falls on heirs rather than decedents, although the former are normally less affluent than the latter, those with middle incomes would tend to be more encumbered than the standard distributional tables would imply. An increasing number of leading theorists and economists are demanding the eradication of the tax, and even its backers acknowledge that it is so perforated with intricacy, loopholes, and mutilations that it requires a complete overhaul.
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