Ray Madoff

And so to raise or lower the exemption or raise or lower the tax rate will not be effective because this tax has been effectively killed.

And

So we're not going to start seeing all types of robust action with respect to this estate tax.

And I think it's because the estate tax, it wasn't just, well, we're always vulnerable to rich people.

I think the problem was that the estate tax had an Achilles heel, and that is that it was –

theoretically designed to be imposed on the donor, on the dead person.

And so what it meant was for those individuals who indeed paid high income taxes their whole lives, they paid lots of income taxes, now we're imposing a second tax on them, and it seemed kind of just punitive in some weird way to the public.

This was made easier because the public doesn't know very much about what happens on the income tax side.

Most people don't know that money received by gifts and inheritances and all of those things are tax-free.

And I know this is true because in this area, a lot of people ask me, well, if I give more than $19,000 to my kids, don't they have to pay income taxes on it?

This is because of some gift tax issues.

exclusion amount.

But people are confused about this.

And so the estate tax is a kind of an awkward tax, and it made it easy for Congress to stop acting.

What's particularly interesting is that the estate tax has become so ineffective that—and I'm going to give you a number, which is truly shocking—

When the top 1% of Americans had $55 trillion, which is how much they had in 2025, the total amount raised by the estate and gift tax, which is supposed to be a 40% tax on all transfers during life or at death, the total amount raised was $28 billion.

Wow.

Wow.

That's 0.06%.

It's nothing.