You can save family farms and businesses without repealing the estate tax. And under current law, most middle-class people can pass on a decent estate to their kids and pay little or no tax. No, it's a tax on those who inherit an estate from someone who died. Hard work is glorified as a justification for withdrawing aid from welfare recipients. The principle that you should work for what you get disappears when you merely inherit money.
Most people never have to.
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, fewer than 1.9 percent of the 2.3 million people who died in 1997 had any tax levied on their estates. This repeal is designed to help the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. A couple can double both those numbers if it arranges its assets correctly. And even among the 43,000 estates that paid inheritance taxes in 1997, most paid modestly. All this tax relief for the very wealthiest Americans is justified in the name of family farms and family businesses.