Let me assure you David, with over half the population with assets getting old and dying, you are about to see as much as 25% of all personal wealth go to the government in estate taxes.
The estate tax will be probably bigger than the Federal income tax to the treasury because of all of the older people passing on over the next 20 years.
It would be a crime to suspend this tax until at least the next 25 years goes by. The people who created this country's deficit should be obligated to put what they could into paying down their debt and not pass it on to the innocent unborn.
Well over 99% of the estates are below the exemption level; and even by doing that, the cost of collection is somewhere around the tax amount realized. When you load the direct collection costs with the unavoidable IRS administration overhead costs applicable to the estate tax function, at least in my view, it is pretty clear that you lose money on the tax.
Reduce the exemption? The tax becomes unenforceable and the collection cost goes up dramatically.
I also subscribe to the view that there are a number of other problems with the Death Tax from a policy point of view--you may not agree but the votes are there to make repeal permanent, even among the fuzzies who agree with your point of view, and the tax is going to be permanently eliminated in the near term.