As we all know, President Trump has promised to repeal the estate tax, claiming that the tax is just plain wrong. It is easy to say that our country should repeal the estate tax, considering so few families actually pay the tax, but other tax areas will have to give in order to make up for the loss. The estate tax has two siblings—the gift tax and the generation-skipping tax. As of now, it is unclear how President Trump will balance the three taxes. His campaign website sketched out a plan that involved replacing the estate tax with a tax on all capital gains and no mention of the other two taxes. Ultimately, with the estate tax only generating 0.005% of annual tax collections, the tax incites more of a political debate than a federal revenue one.
See Brian J. O’Connor, Once Again, the Estate Tax May Die, N.Y. Times, February 18, 2017.
Special thanks to Joel Dobris (Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law) for bringing this article to my attention.
