Excluding any type of income from taxation means every other type of income needs to be taxed at a higher rate, all to protect whatever is being carved out. Thus we tax income from investments, salaries, and yes inheritance.
Inheritance tax has positive externalities as inherited wealth discourages people from being productive members of society. Meanwhile taxing salaries discourages work, and taxing investments discourages savings.
That reductionist analysis treats people as individualised economic drones. What do you mean by "productive" - earning a salary? Contributing to civic society? People don't just do nothing if they have means.
Inheritance tax damages filial peity and encourages the disintegration of society.
A hobo is less damaging than an unproductive trust fund kid. Many people contribute nothing which directly disintegrates society no encouragement required.
If a moderately larger inheritance seems to impact filial piety then it didn’t exist in the first place.
You seem to be very cynical about the input of people with money. This "unproductive trust fund kid" seems to be a sort of caricature which is easy to rely on because it evokes the "undeserving rich".
In reality, inherited wealth leads to the security which can result in great feats in music, the arts, new business, and the growth of civil society.
And encouraging generations to rely on one another directly, rather than via a welfare state, ensures that people take care of each other properly.
The alternative is the sort of degenerate individualism which has so severely weakened western society.
It might occasionally have positive outcomes but this is rare enough I’ve never seen it. I have seen the far more likely destruction personally and repeatedly. You may assume there are close family bonds with such situations, but for someone who’s never worked child rearing is an unpleasant shift, time for nanny’s etc.
People picture retirement just early, but there’s many social structures built to support people leaving the workforce in their 60’s. A 15 year old who knows they will never need to work is set adrift, why exactly go to college or even get good grades in high school? In their 20’s it’s hard to maintain relationships with people who are unavailable most of the time and can’t suddenly travel on a whim. Spending time with others set adrift can be fine, but tends to result in extremes like BASE jumping, drugs, etc. Even hobbies like general aviation can get surprisingly deadly when you have extreme amounts of free time for decades.
Honestly, the negative impact on the individual is seriously underappreciated. It’s bad enough I am not handing personal wealth to family and advise everyone else to do the same.
PS: A possible exception is matching income. 1$ of inheritance per 1$ earned seems like it would mostly solve these issues, but I don’t have enough examples to know if it actually works and I am not willing to experiment on family members.
> "Inheritance tax shouldn't be a thing in the first place."
The problem with entrenched intergenerational wealth is you eventually end up with a feudalistic society, with a small population of extremely wealthy families controlling all the capital but essentially just becoming rent-seekers, with no incentive or need to innovate in order to maintain their wealth (on the contrary, they will seek to suppress innovation and disruption in order to maintain the status quo). In the long run this leads to violent revolution or other forms of societal collapse.