I agree...How many people really expect to inherit 5 million dollars. My understanding is though that it has the potential to hurt farming families given that their estate value tends to be more in land and equipment.
It seems like it would be easy to create a family farm exemption. Create a percentage of land that is used for farming and exempt it up to, I dunno, $20 million.
How many farmers are dying each year with tracts of land worth $5 million? Less than a thousand?
I agree philosophically with an appeal of the estate tax or at least a large exemption. (There is a part of me that thinks that no one should inherit hundreds of millions of dollars but I can’t fully explain why).
It just seems like when you are screwing around with families that make less than $150K, 10 figure estates should take a back seat.