There are all kinds of irrevocable trusts that exist to remove assets from your taxable estate so that they can be passed to heirs without paying estate tax. Raising the estate tax (which is already 40%) would just make planning to use these techniques more attractive.

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BugsJustFindMe 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The existence of perpetual trusts is solvable in a world that has decided to fix the insanity caused by intergenerational wealth transfer instead of propping it up. "This thing we could also eliminate stops us from eliminating this other thing" is a silly platform. Just eliminate them both.

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jeffreyrogers an hour ago | parent [-]

Perpetual trusts are different from irrevocable trusts, which have legitimate use cases. I don't really see how irrevocable trusts would be gotten rid of. In most states all trusts are irrevocable by default and there is a huge body of law dealing with trusts. Getting rid of them is essentially impossible without huge changes in the political/legal system.

	▲	BugsJustFindMe 28 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Getting rid of them is essentially impossible without huge changes in the political/legal system. So is getting rid of intergenerational wealth transfer. So since we're already dreaming about a new system that seems irrelevant. > legitimate use cases Intergenerational wealth transfer also has "legitimate use cases" if one gets to define "legitimate". I'm curious what legitimate cases you have in mind.
	▲	tony69 24 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		By “raising death taxes”, I meant comprehensively, eliminating loopholes, as the sources I linked discuss more at length. Re: irrevocable trust, a cursory search revealed no legitimate use case imo, all use cases I see are proxies to skirt taxes or hide income/wealth. What would you consider a legitimate use case for one? Your point re: case law is well taken, but per [2] up until a few decades ago there was a cat-and-mouse game between laws and tricks regarding inheritance wealth transfer. This stopped and it’s easier than ever to transfer > 10M tax free at or death, which has massive implications for wealth inequality. That said I agree it’s extremely unlikely and have no hope that any of this will change.