[gambiting]

>>when a child could inherit enough to get a better life without working than someone working his whole life

Why not? If I, as a parent, worked hard enough to make life easy for my child, who are you to tell me that I can't do it?(I mean in general, don't take this personally) I have paid tax on everything that I made, bought, or built - why would they pay tax on the same things again??

Following your argument, we should stop giving our children absolutely anything - you could argue that someone's child should not be given a phone or a car,because it's unfair towards someone else who had to work for it,right? But then why do you care - I worked hard to buy those things to give to my children. Anything else is irrelevant.

I can give you another example which makes me hate inheritance tax with passion - I know a family, which had a house which was owned by them for centuries. And then, when the parents died,they didn't have a lot of money, so the only thing left was that house. HMRC enters the scene -> children have to pay inheritance tax on the house. There is no money left,so they have to sell their family house, purely because people think it would be "unfair" for them to keep it. Absolute BS if you ask me.

[phkahler]

Let us first say that if you sold it to someone else there would likely be sales tax involved (in most places) so the idea of giving someone stuff tax-free is unusual. The point of inheritance taxes is not to prevent you passing it on, it is to prevent the building of family empires which tend to screw people (in addition to being another revenue source). But why? The ONLY purpose of government is actually to preserve order by preventing people from being assholes to each other. Turns out people tend to do that if nobody keeps them in check. Now the rich kinda think the purpose is to keep people from doing anything to THEM, but even that still concedes my stated purpose for government. Large accumulations of wealth can be both good or bad, but from where I sit it looks like the super-rich aren't even sure what to do with all their money, so why not? Estate-tax is just another knob to turn in the preservation of society. The only real question is how far to turn it. I'm open to debate from all sides on that issue.

[acheron]

f I, as a parent, worked hard enough to make life easy for my child, who are you to tell me that I can't do it?

The point is to increase your children's (that is, everyone's) reliance on the government, of course. The ideal for statists would be to remove parents from the equation completely. You've read Brave New World, right?

[ForHackernews]

Is this a parody of a libertarian comment?

The point is that people should stand on their own two feet, and not coast through life on daddy's money (or government largesse, for that matter).

[gambiting]

But you are talking about extreme cases, where people inherit millions of dollars, and that's probably 0.1% of all inheritance cases. I am arguing that this would hit regular people with regular incomes. You save up $100,000 for your child to go to collage over 25 years of your career, and then happen to die? Well, shit son, your child only gets $15,000, rest is taken by the government to make life more fair. But hey, at least they are not coasting through life on their daddy's money, right?

[ForHackernews]

> I am arguing that this would hit regular people with regular incomes.

It won't, and it doesn't. You're misinformed on this topic.

There's a blanket exemption for estates up to $5,000,000: http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employ...

Nobody is interested in taxing your kid's college fund--we just don't want the Waltons running our country for the next 100 years: http://walmart1percent.org/family/

[gambiting]

Despite majority of HN thinking otherwise, there is world outside of US. Here in the UK the threshold for the inheritance tax is £325,000, and unless you live in a 2 bedroom apartment or a very small house in the countryside, you will most definitely hit it, which means that most people in the UK will have to pay inheritance tax on their family homes once their parents die. This is wrong in my opinion.

[maxerickson]

This article says the average home value is £187,000:

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/jun/03/uk-average-hous...

The tax is apparently 40%. So the heirs of a single person with a home worth twice the average will owe £11,600 in taxes (it looks like some of the exemption is transferable for couples, so ~0 taxes for lots of people).

It doesn't seem so onerous for people receiving a $600,000 house to have to pay $20,000 in taxes (it's certainly an amount that most owners of such houses will be able to plan for).

[ForHackernews]

Then maybe there's a case for increasing the limit in UK tax policy, or perhaps granting a special exemption for family homes.

It's not a case for totally eliminating estate taxes.