I'm astonished that Ben Harris can get so much wrong in one short article. According to TaxVos's own tables (T09-0201), estate taxes will generate $15 billion in revenue this calendar year. The federal government will spend $3.5 trillion in the same period (ignoring the inevitable social security and medicare explosions). Ie, estate taxes raise about .4 % of government spending. As someone who has worked in and around DC for many years, I assure you that the government could reduce its spending by 10% with almost zero impact on its operations. I'll give you two justifications for this assertion: 1. Private companies with profitability problems often set 20% cost reduction targets, meet them within a year, and go on to full recoveries when things improve. The government is long overdue for such a house cleaning. It has way more dead wood than productive workers, thanks to the SEIU. 2. I personally witnessed a case in which a federal employee ordered a $250,000 Sun computer system (for which her dept had neither use nor aptitude) because she had that much unspent in her budget, and didn't want to "lose" the allocation next year. When the computers arrived, there was no suitable space for them --- they went into storage and were never used. I regret not having blown the whistle on that crime --- the perp was a "friend" and I was too cowardly to stir up trouble. Similar profligate and useless spending happened recently in several states with federally-mandated voting machines. The list is endless. I am a single man (actually I'm married to a wonderful Thai woman who's not a US citizen so she doesn't get the 3.5M exclusion). I built my business starting from zero. After busting my butt for 40+ years I retired with a sizable fortune. I paid taxes in full on every dime. I would like to pass that money on to my biological children, with whom I was reunited a few years ago. They've had medical and many other problems and they really need the money. I've set up CRUTs for them but it's not really enough to protect them when inflation kicks in, as it surely will. The 45% that the government plans to extract from my estate would go a long way to protect my kids, and I could die knowing that the second half of their lives was going to be a lot better than the first. I cannot tell you how deeply I resent self-appointed comptrollers who presume to decide how much of my remaining money should be wasted on a government that screws up 95% of everything it touches..