“And death tax increases have no affect on me”
Actually, it does; it affects everybody in tangential ways.
“With effective tax rates rising above 80 percent, the death tax discourages savings and investment, encourages the squandering of assets and allows the government to take most of whatever is left. IT SILENTLY STEALS FROM OUR COMMUNITIES THE INVESTMENT NECESSARY TO BUILD WEALTH AND CREATE JOBS.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/01/opinion/how-taxes-trickle-down.html?_r=0
It affects family farms, and when farms go under because of the inheritance tax, agriculture suffers and food prices increase.
It really doesn’t take much of a small business to have a book value large enough for the estate tax to require the family to sell it to pay the taxes owed. A small store, a McDonald’s, a gas station, a winery, etc. may only throw off a few hundred thousand a year in profits, but the assets that make those profits possible exceed the $5M exclusion.