Inheritance wealth

Let me begin by saying that I've been afforded the luxury in my life to have had a father who sacrificed much of his life to providing for his family. I never went hungry (well, except for the times we had meals that had onions in them--which I can't eat), I always had clothes on my back (maybe not the cool clothes, though, making me the object of much ridicule at school), I went to college without having to work as well (an unalloyed bonus), and I had the continued and somewhat selfish ability to rely on my parents to provide me cheap shelter when I chose to go back to grad school. I also have the luck in having a mother who is as far from spendthrift as you can get; she seemingly wants to see how much money she can save over the term of her life, in order to pass on something to my sister and me, I presume. That is the way she was brought up, just as my father was brought up to provide for his family despite what personal crosses he might have had to bear.
That being said, and in full knowledge that this is quite contrary to my own economic benefit, I think the elimination or even reduction of the "estate tax", which the Senate will vote on next week, is a wildly anti-American, nearly immoral political move. Our nation was founded with a distinct interest in discarding inherited wealth as remaining the prime determinant in one's ability to pursue life, liberty, etc as it had been in Great Britain. Most of the Founding Fathers and successive generations of American leaders believed (aside from many of the relatively quickly discredited Federalists) in the leveling of class distinctions in our new nation--heck, even our President is called, simply, "Mr. President", instead of "Your Majesty", or "Your Excellence", or some other honorific. Wealth was supposed to be earned by individuals, not passed down in perpetuity from generation to generation, and even if that belief was soon to be made fairly unrealistic by the massive wealth created by the Industrial Revolution (which created fortunes so large that even splitting them up among many heirs did not truly eliminate them), the value gulf between the wealthy and the impoverished was not necessarily unbridgeable. The FFs consciously strove to create an "open" society (wherein a titled nobility did not exist, and where anyone could supposedly work hard/long enough to become a landowner--the mark of a successful person long into the 20th century), because it was in the best interests of a continuing democracy. Inherited wealth was seen as anathema to a democracy because it could engender in fact a nobility the FFs eliminated in name. One of the many ways we have historically been able to check the rise of a permanent wealthy class (although one would hardly be faulted for thinking that we've done a pretty poor job of doing so since the post-Civil War period) is through the taxation of inherited wealth.
Levying an inheritance tax is seemingly a no-brainer; it should be an easy sell to the vast majority of US citizens, since for the most part, an estate tax only affects a miniscule portion of the public. Our current law (passed in 2001) states that individuals can pass on $2 million to their heirs tax free, with any additional inheritance being taxable at a 45% rate. To illustrate, let's say my Mom has an estate worth $2,000,000. She decides to pass it all along to my sister and me, evenly split. She pays 0 taxes, and I inherit $1 million tax-free. If she owned $3 million, she would pay 45% tax on that 3rd million, leaving $2,650,000 for my sister and I to split, etc.
Seems like pretty light sledding, doesn't it? How many people have more than $2 mill to leave their heirs, after all, right? Not that many, apparently. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a non-partisan non-profit org, only .5% of the public have estates that large. That's right, 99.5% of the people in this country are completely unaffected by the estate law as currently worded, and that's down from just a touch over 2% when Smirky and co. jobbed the country with his tax cuts in 2001. And now the Repubs want to reduce or eliminate it entirely? What the f*&k for? And why would anyone sane even think this is a good idea in the first place? This is so obviously a case of the rich getting richer at the cost of revenue for the government--and nothing else--that it should have been laughable from the start. The law in 2000 was already a joke to begin with--how much money does one person need, especially unearned money? I would be ashamed to vote for a bill to increase the amount of money already rich people can inherit. It's simply obscene. Worse, it's unAmerican.
The estate tax needs to be raised, not lowered; inheritance shouldn't be used a method to perpetuate a class system that so many patriots devoted their entire lives to eliminate. Our nation used to pride itself on the fact that there was equality of opportunity, if not equality of means (which would constitute the ultimate open society). When the rich own so much of our system already, though, and work to increase their wealth by "gaming" the laws to their exclusive benefit, even that shred of our heritage is in stark danger of being lost.