[quote='Redbeard',index.php?page=Thread&postID=1492 80#post149280]
How is it not a success tax?

...

I guess im just not following you.

Maybe I should go read the Economist?[/quote]
Again, going back to the [url='http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html']resource[/url] I mentioned before:

In terms of types of financial wealth, the top one percent of households have 44.1% of all privately held stock, 58.0% of financial securities, and 57.3% of business equity. The top 10% have 85% to 90% of stock, bonds, trust funds, and business equity, and over 75% of non-home real estate. Since financial wealth is what counts as far as the control of income-producing assets, we can say that just 10% of the people own the United States of America.
In light of things like this, yes, I support a tax on extravagantly successful people (the top 10%) disproportionate to the share of tax for the working class, which we can generously for this example call the other 90% of us. Yes, since those people hold a disproportionate share of the wealth in this country, I think they are the most reasonable people to tax, disproportionate to the rest of us.

There's more there, about the estate tax, in fact:

Figures on inheritance tell much the same story. According to a study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, only 1.6% of Americans receive $100,000 or more in inheritance. Another 1.1% receive $50,000 to $100,000. On the other hand, 91.9% receive nothing (Kotlikoff & Gokhale, 2000). Thus, the attempt by ultra-conservatives to eliminate inheritance taxes -- which they always call "death taxes" for P.R. reasons -- would take a huge bite out of government revenues for the benefit of less than 1% of the population. (It is noteworthy that some of the richest people in the country oppose this ultra-conservative initiative, suggesting that this effort is driven by anti-government ideology. In other words, few of the ultra-conservatives behind the effort will benefit from it in any material way.)
So you're not a multi-millionaire--it doesn't affect you at all. What convinced you to fight so hard for that ideal, without considering the historical perspective for why the estate tax exists in the first place?

As for being "taxed twice", that happens all the time. Corporations pay taxes on their earnings, and then the shareholders get taxed again. The entire thing about the "death tax" has been horribly distorted, mostly for ideological reasons, but it's another example of bad economic policy. A couple highlights on estate tax myths from Responsiblewealth.org more fully illustrate the hysteria over this benign and completely fair tax policy:
  • 98% of Americans who die pass their estate on to their heirs completely tax-free in fact, they get a valuable tax break on capital gains. Zero estate tax is charged on assets left to a spouse or to charity.
  • For 98% of Americans, the Estate Tax takes away nothing, and it actually shields assets from capital gains taxes. For the other 2%, the average effective tax rate is 17%.
It's not a death tax. Death tax is just propaganda. No one lost a family farm because of it, there's not a single documented case of it. That story was just PR, spin, and lies.