Money don’t have owners
By 
A perpetually amusing spectacle, for those of us sickos with a taste for such things, is the Republican campaign to eliminate the estate tax. The estate tax is probably the single most defensible tax that exists, because:
(1) Inherited wealth is obviously the least defensible kind of wealth there could be. BTW about 60% of the wealth in America presently was inherited.
(2) The “double taxation” argument is not only dumb as a matter of principle — all sorts of money is taxed more than once — but is largely false even empirically. The vast fortunes that are the only estates currently being subjected to ANY estate tax are typically made up in large part of assets that have never been taxed at all, such as unrealized capital gains.
(3) The current exemptions are so absurdly high — $26 million for a married couple! — that you have to be crazy rich to pay any estate tax at all, leaving aside the many legal dodges, such as giving money to Harvard, that exist to lessen the indescribable pain of being forced to help pay for the continuation of a society that made you filthy rich, even after you’re dead.
This is a good article reviewing the present situation, although it has the unfortunate headline, “The Estate Tax is Irrelevant to More than 99 Percent of Americans.” A more accurate headline would be that less than one in one thousand (.08%) estates pay any federal estate tax at all, but even this pathetic figure is far too high for the running dogs of our plutocratic overlords. Things have gotten so bad on this score that the most radical “left” proposal on the table, put forth by the (((socialist))) Bernie Sanders, would result in .7% of estates paying any estate tax, which is still less than one third of the percentage that paid any estate tax during the Maoist cultural revolution of (checks notes) the dot.com boom of the late 1990s.
As always, the effectiveness of right wing propaganda explains much of what is actually going on:
[A 2017] survey also revealed that many Americans had incorrect notions about the estate tax. Thirty-seven percent of respondents knew that the tax affects only a few families (less than 0.1 percent of people who die) each year. Thirty percent believed, incorrectly, that “most” families were subject to the tax. Sixty-three percent incorrectly believed that poor and middle-class families were primarily affected by the tax, even though it applied only to estates exceeding $5 million at the time the survey was administered.
As always, we are a nation of temporarily embarrassed billionaires. (Aphorism adjusted for inflation. Thanks Biden!).