Estate tax is just a special case of gift taxation. Do you know how gift taxes work?

The average Joe thinks that gifts are income. He's so wrong. There is NO entry on your 1040 where you can record gifts. Gifts are a completely different thing from income.

First off, if you RECEIVE a gift--any gift--you don't pay taxes on it. At all, ever. If you GIVE a gift, you don't have to report it to the IRS unless it is over $13k. So, does that mean you have to pay taxes on any gift greater than $13k? Noooooooooo! If you follow the twisted, obfuscated logic of the gift tax form, you will come to realize that no gift taxes ever need to be paid by anyone who has not--over the course of a lifetime--made gifts in excess of...(calm yourself)...five million dollars.

Estate taxes are just one-time instances of gift taxes. You only have to pay estate taxes on estates larger than...(still calm?)...five million dollars. Soooo, between gifts and estate taxes, an estate worth less than ten million can give away five million dollars, tax free, plus another five million dollars at the time of death. Without paying any taxes.

Note: this is without doing anything particularly tricky.

Actually getting tricky with tax law, an estate can avoid paying more than minimal taxes on far larger sums, both through gifts (from two, count 'em, spouses--yeah, baby, yeah!) or through a wealth (ho-ho-ho!) of shadowy estate wonkiness known only to tax lawyers who specialize in such dark matters!

Now, take a deep breath, and pay attention. Repealing the estate tax won't make any difference. The only difference it will make is allowing the rich to do openly what they have been doing clandestinely all along. Should we subscribers to this sub object to greed addicts "outing" themselves? Of course not. The outing is gratuitous, but it is also incredibly bad PR. We should take a shit-stained page out of Dubya's playbook and say:

"Bring it on"!