Ray Madoff

And it's not because of the exemption amount.

It's not because of the lower rate.

It's because people are able to avoid the tax altogether.

And that's what the problem is.

Right.

If you think about that, we're designed, we're supposed to have a tax on the top 1%, and that percent has $55 trillion.

By the way, this is a time where the total revenue raised by the federal government is like $5 trillion today.

So they have massive amounts of wealth.

So when people say it doesn't matter if we tax the rich, that is just simply not true.

Can I add one more piece here before we do?

I think the thing that makes it most telling that the estate tax is actually something that now works as a cover for the rich rather than as a burden is the fact that in 2025, a time when the Republicans fully controlled that new tax bill and they easily could have repealed the estate tax.

They chose not to do it.

No mention of it.

It had been their number one issue, but now all of a sudden they didn't care.

And that's because they wanted to preserve all of the income tax benefits they got when there was an estate tax that provided cover.

So I think the first thing that we need to do is we need to recognize that the estate tax has been really effectively killed.

And as I mentioned, I think it is because it was easier to kill because of this vulnerability that it was imposed as a sort of a second tax on the person who dies.

And—

And so for a lot of reasons, I think that we have to understand that this is not a tax that's going to be resurrected.

But it will actually help us more to get rid of the tax than to keep it.