I don't think a 50% tax that only aply's after the first 3+ million is going to change the lifestyle of your children. It's mostly a question of what happens to their children's children.
The advantage of a large (40+%) estate tax is to avoid creating an old money aristocracy. There is a long history of the problems created when people who never earned it get great wealth. Granted some people build upon inherited wealth, but it's far less common than you might think and looking at the net worth of people who inherited 100+ million you find few examples of people that did much better than investing in mutual funds.
Bill Gates might be considered a great CEO but he also inherited money and exploited family connections to sell an OS he never developed to IBM. None of which would have been impacted by estate taxes.
PS: Consider the Walton family the five of them all have about 15.3 - 15.7 billion because none of them are using it to actively generate more wealth. Even though they inherited it 15+ years ago it's just stagnating.
One of Sam Walton's 5 children was a VC in solar energy before he passed away young, another owns Arvest Bank, and another is still running Walmart...
I also bet a majority of their wealth is still in that stock, as major sell-offs of insider holdings suggests a company may not continue to produce growing profits - which hasn't been the case. However, I'm sure some still have quite a bit with extremely capable money managers.
I would not call that wealth stagnating in the least bit.
I don't know how accurately their wealth is measured, but hiding a billion is not that easy so I will assume it's reasonably close. Anyway, ((15.7 / 15.3) ^ (1/15)) - 1 = 0.17% per year difference in wealth generation and spending per year for 5 people.
I expect they are all playing around with side investments of one sort or another, but they have had plenty of dividends to work with and little to show for it. It's not that I think the government would do all that much better, rather taxing society more to help maintain such wealth has zero benefit from what I can see.
The advantage of a large (40+%) estate tax is to avoid creating an old money aristocracy. There is a long history of the problems created when people who never earned it get great wealth. Granted some people build upon inherited wealth, but it's far less common than you might think and looking at the net worth of people who inherited 100+ million you find few examples of people that did much better than investing in mutual funds.
Bill Gates might be considered a great CEO but he also inherited money and exploited family connections to sell an OS he never developed to IBM. None of which would have been impacted by estate taxes.
PS: Consider the Walton family the five of them all have about 15.3 - 15.7 billion because none of them are using it to actively generate more wealth. Even though they inherited it 15+ years ago it's just stagnating.