[Sgt_Schultze]

It won't help. The extremely wealthy will do what Bill Gates did. He formed a tax-exempt foundation and is moving his MS stock into it at today's value. Bill will never have to realize the gain of $80 billion and will never have to pay any estate taxes on the value of his property.

But he IS still free to whine about not paying enough in taxes. BTW, Warren Buffett is doing EXACTLY the same thing.

[Buckeye McFrog]

The best tax shelters in the world are useless once Bolsheviks show up with guns.

A lot of people in Europe learned that last century.

[sphinx]

To be effective, a tax on wealth would have to go after all the foundations as well. Then the truly wealthy would have to take their wealth abroad, or overthrow the government to avoid being looted. Which is how wealth taxation tends to end up historically.

Warren Buffett has been a nuisance for years with his talk of how the rich are undertaxed. His comments on the estate tax are especially risible. Buffett has committed most of his wealth to the Gates Foundation, which does Good Things. I respect Gates' and Buffett's commitment to philanthropy, though I can think of several other ways I'd prefer to spend the money. (I will do so when I finally accumulate a hundred billion dollars of my own.) But Buffett also set each of his children up with a foundation worth several billion dollars. If congressional Republicans weren't so completely tone deaf (I know, I know, it's hopeless), they would long since have adopted a Buffett rule as the goal of estate tax reform: tax free transmission of assets up to $5 billion to each heir, with no estate taxation until that threshold is passed. Since Democrats for many years have hailed Buffett as the font of all wisdom on estate taxation, they should be willing to support this … right?