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From the article itself ... about 5,500 At 2,426,264 deaths in the US per year, the top 0.2%.

• riffer 17y ago
  Nope. The tax may apply to a small number of people, but it isn't the top x-percent. There are a lot of strategies for getting around the estate tax, and the people who pay it are not the richest people but instead are upper middle class people who (for whatever reason) don't employ the strategies. The it-only-hits-a-few people argument also has at least two other issues. One is that these things morph over time: the AMT was created to apply to just several dozen people, and now Congress passes a patch every year to make it apply to hundreds of thousands of people instead of millions of people. And anyhow, how can a tax be fair because it only applies to a handful of people? Isn't that the same thing as the tyrannical many taking from the few? I would prefer to have a tax system where everyone pays enough in taxes such that they want to keep the overall system as small as possible.