The 16th Amendment says refers to taxing income not estates. Plus that income has already been taxed once.
Section 8. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; </P
The estate tax is not "uniform" as not all people have to pay it. Of course, the progressive income tax is not uniform either.
BTW, you are right in your "hard work" versus productivity argument. There should not be a death tax on any estate regardless of how it is earned. I didn't mean to apply that I meant otherwise. I didn't word that very well. But hard work usually leads to productivity. Atleast that has been my experience.
The lifetime exclusion amount on estates is only $1,000,000 right now which increases to $1.5 million in 2002 and 2003. It does not take a very large farm to meet that amount and the estate is not in liquid assets which means the inheritor has to sell off the business assets to cover it. That makes it kind of hard to sustain a business.
Don't have the farm data you requested, but somehow I suspect farms in Georgia are not as large as those in Kansas, but I could be wrong.:-)
You will be happy to know that my father is completely AGAINST farm subsidies. He thinks the markets should be left to operate freely. If he wanted farm subsidies wouldn't he vote Democrap? Considering this discussion, you are much more likely to vote Democrap than he or I.
Besides, the death tax raises very little net revenue, if any, after the cost of assessing it. It is simply a redistribution of wealth. Our country has the second highest death tax in the world and I thought this was the USA we were living in!
The estate tax is a tax on income. When someone inherits an estate, it is treated as new income. The inheritor is then taxed on the new income. Mincing words, perhaps, but it's a legal tax on income.
If it is raising very little revenue, it can't be redistributing very much wealth.