The death tax is not designed to be a tax–it is designed to redistribute wealth. The money is taken from the people who earned it, goes to the government, and the government redistributes it to people who have not earned it. Another perspective might call it theft.

Yesterday Breitbart posted an article about the death tax. The article reported:

“It’s just wrong to work your whole life to build up a nest egg, build your own business–you pass away and Uncle Sam can swoop in and take away nearly half of everything you’ve earned,” because of the ‘Death Tax,’ said Rep. Kevin P. Brady (R.-Texas). “Can you imagine that? Having to sell off most of your land, just to keep it from the government, just to save the house,” he said.

“There are two new major threats to family-owned farms and businesses right now,” said Brady, who succeeded Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R.-Wis.) as the committee chairman when Ryan became the Speaker.

“Number one is Hillary Clinton’s proposal to raise the death tax rate to 65 percent, which would be the highest rate since the 1980s,” he said. “At that point, you’re confiscating property and land and businesses,” he said.

“The other threat is the Obama administration’s Treasury Department rules that came put in August.” The new rules, called “valuation rules,” impose higher tax liabilities onto families trying to pass their businesses to family members, he said. It is as if the IRS decided to raise taxes on its own, he said.

The article explains the impact of the death tax in real terms:

Brady told Breitbart News he did not grow up in a wealthy family, so he did not understand the death tax and its impact until 1997, his first year in Congress. The moment came when a couple from his district came up to him and sketched out what the death tax had in store for them, their children and their nursery business.

The couple took out a piece of paper and sketched it out for him. “Just on a piece of paper, they wrote down how they had no debt, two or three kids were running the business and they basically showed me that if they could have enough money in life insurance and could go to the bank to borrow the money, they could keep their family business,” the chairman said.

The idea the family would have to exhaust its life insurance and then go into debt, just to keep its business going after paying off the death tax, he said, is “un-American, immoral and wrong.”

The money a family accumulates in a family business has already been taxed. That alone should preclude the government from taking any more of it! If nothing else, Hillary’s death tax will kill not only the family farm, but any successful family business.