The poor don't have estates. When they die, they leave their families wondering how to pay for the funeral, not how to preserve their holdings for the next generation.

The estate tax exemption is $11M, so you do not pay any estate taxes if the wealth you leave behind is less than that.

Do you know many poor people with more than $11M in wealth?

When you own a small business and some land your wealth may be over 11m but not liquid.

I guess I've never thought of a landed businessman as poor.

And of course there’s ways to solve this: tax the land at disposition. You don’t need to collect on the estate tax for land holdings as dollars at time of inheritance, you can just drop fractional ownership into a trust c/o the IRS and even retain right of first refusal if you should be able to pay it off in time. This is how the IRS already handles illiquid assets if an American chooses to expatriate: you get the choice to pay in cash or fractional ownership in trust.

A floor of $500K-1M indexed to inflation will ensure the poor don't have to plan their estates at all. These don't have to be hard questions.

So this generation, the upper middle class and higher will be affected, and next generation everyone above the extreme poor will be affected.

I picked a totally arbitrary number. If we sat down for more than the 30s it took me to make this reasonable sounding number up, I'm sure we could find a satisfactory system :)

Any satisfactory system will be alterable by

(a) inflationary practices

(b) those scheming to take advantage of loopholes

in 10 or less years.

Unless you (a) index it to inflation and (b) make an attempt to close loopholes, rather than surrendering at the starting line ^_^

I like your optimism, but I've failed to witness a law that has never been twisted into some gross contorted display of what it was normally used for at least once.

So long as the harm caused by those taking advantage of it is less than the good created by the change, it should still be put in place.

Texas in so many ways scares me, but the fact that many of their laws have expirations actually makes sense.