Godwin's Law,

At least 90% of them. Wouldn't say dodged, but they paid at most 10%. But since you want an example, Paris Hilton.

The problem is that when you tax those who own hundreds of millions and billions in assets, you cause a negative ripple effect in the economy. Imagine Bill Gates' estate paying $15-25 billion. A sudden liquidation of his assets would be catastrophic. You could charge the estate gradually, but I have practical doubts that incremental payments could be paid off within a reasonable time frame in one generation and without harming the economy.

Nice source! 

Zarf,

Are you being sarcastic?

Anyhow, I should mention that I did not represent a family of $5 million well before someone decides to miss the point and beat the scarecrow. By 2009 levels, they would have had a taxable income of $1.5 million, and have had to pay $675,000 at an estate tax of 45%. Small time millionaires would have been less affected by 2009 levels, and the Obama administration wants to raise the estate tax ceiling to $3.5 million.

My point was that smaller millionaires effectively pay a greater percentage of estate taxes than do elites. The elites can dispose of immense amounts of wealth to hire teams of professional accountants and set up schemes that allow them to reduce their estate tax to negligible amounts. What this does is concentrate wealth because the elite are effectively not affected by the estate tax, but the lesser rich easily pay 1/4 of their net worth to the government.

Yell,

What are you talking about?

Whose money is taxed as it accumulates?

the guy earning the estate is taxed every year

then he dies and you tax the estate

"the guy earning the estate is taxed every year

then he dies and you tax the estate
"

You tax the fact that someone else is getting the estate.

> Godwin's Law wrote:

> Can you give an example of an extremely wealthy estate which managed to dodge the estate tax?  Otherwise, your first argument's simply conjecture.  Estate tax is different from income tax... not necessarily all the same loopholes, and not always so straightforward.

Can't really argue the second point.  However, that's not an argument against the estate tax as a whole, but rather an argument against the minimum estate value.  The question would then be "at what dollar amount would an inheritor not be ruined by an estate tax?"
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it's not that hard to dodge estate tax, although I imagine the details differ from country to country

The classic way used to be to hide the biggest % of your wealth is to deposit all of your shares minus one share into a bank safe or with some foreign broker, then when you die you leave the key to the safe/password to the account to your heirs and poof suddenly they can pretend to have been owners of the family business for years already, with you just having shown up at the stock holder's meeting with only one share and your heirs simply let you run the business in spite of your extreme minority in the voting capital because you were teh shiznit. In its basic form this one should be hard to pull off in modern legal systems, but I'm sure there's more advanced

Another classic is to donate the title of a property to your children while you're alive while stipulating the right for a life long rent for yourself.