I'm glad SOMEBODY else recognized that a flat sales tax disproprotionately burdens the poor. I get distinctly irritated when people go on a lot about how the rich earned their money and thus shouldn't pay tax on so much of it, but that same argument somehow falls mute when it comes to the money that lower income and working middle class people earn. They would be paying tax on nearly everything if all taxes were replaced by a sales tax, and simply, that isn't fair at all when our societies support so many thousands or millions of people who have millions of times more money than they will need for decent living.

Another consideration about the "wealth = earned = tax is not fair" argument, is that massive wealth created by say, a corporation, or a series of corporations, owned by an individual, which makes him very wealthy-- that's not money he made by himself. That's money he made by amassing and organizing the work of hundreds, thousands of people. Those people took hourly wages or salaries and probably their big ambition in life was to own a house or maybe have a slightly better house than their parents did, or afford college for their children. So, when it comes to taxes to pay for things like public education, or public healthcare, or whatever the case might be based upon the country in question, I do feel that the richest people do have a special obligation to pay their fair proportionate share of their disposable income to support those systems. Were it not for the people available, literate and trained to work for them at sometimes quite low wages (I can't speak for European countries, but this is certainly true for the U.S.) a single individual making 10, 20, 50 million in a year simply isn't possible. The only tradeoff I would consider just if we did a substantial change in the tax structure which greatly relieved tax burdens off the wealthiest people and entities, would be mandatory pay structures to ensure at least a dignified living off the lowest wage. I know that some countries, such as Sweden, already have this. But no one in the United States is covering all their bills with a $5/hour job, unless they are living at home and not buying anything. They will almost certainly never own a house just off their work income. And while yes we can talk about school and education and people pulling themselves up to get better jobs, economies are always pyramid distributions. The lower the pay, the greater number of people working for that level of pay. That's how it works, so the idea that everyone could just put themselves through night school and go get a six figure job is make believe. (At the time of writing this I can't pull up your profile so I do not know which country you live in, but it might be useful to point out that in the U.S., virtually everything is pay-for-it-yourself, short of extraordinary circumstances. There are scholarships for college of course, but the dominant reality for most people is loans which have to be paid back with interest. And the #1 cause of bankruptcy in our country is medical bills.) And, an increasingly smaller number of American companies offer health insurance or retirement plans as part of job benefits. (I am certain this will get considerably worse once our financial crisis has fully kicked in, but it's been on the decline for quite awhile.)

Regarding the estate.... it sounds like you inherited a castle, or manor or something? I really couldn't quite get a fix on what exactly it was that you inherited, but it sounds like a big production if you have a work staff and such to maintain it and work on it. I honestly cannot give you an answer about estate tax in reference to those kinds of situations in Europe because there really is not anything quite like that here in the U.S., unless there are some privately owned skyscrapers or something. But chances are people wealthy enough to privately own a skyscraper have absolutely no problem passing along enough money to cover taxes upon their death--- honestly though, it' svery doubtful that there are any that are privately owned in that sense. More likely they are turned over to the ownership of a "corporation" (and a corporation can be owned by just 1 person) which of course is its own legal entity in the United States and thus will never "die" and pay estate tax on itself. My guess is that even if we had manors and castles and estates and such in private ownership, that is the way they would be passed down. There are many financial loohpoles in the American tax system, and I think that's something that perhaps got glossed over as well. People moving property and assets into trusts, corporations, or in the case of the very wealthy, "non profit foundations" and such, is a way to avoid any sort of estate tax on your property passed along in perpetuity. Those entities have to file tax returns but the individuals who "own" the property would not have to pay tax on anything except whatever profit or money was flowing to them individually from the trust or corporation on a yearly basis, as normal income.

It's a very interesting question, but I simply can't give an answer for it in reference to the American estate tax, because there isn't a true parallel here, and there are aforementioned ways of passing along property and avoiding estate tax. Basically what people do is "trick" the system so that, on paper, they are poor or under the estate tax threshold upon their death, by signing away property or putting it in trusts or LLC's or corporations. There are stubborn old people who refuse to do this and then abruptly die, but I would say out of the rich, we're talking a minority. Anyone wealthy enough to use a lawyer's services or even to have a "family lawyer" and/or financial planner is heavily advised to do this estate planning before old age and sickness or death become immediate concerns, to minimize or even nullify their estate tax liability. So, everything is not as it seems, and it's not like any bit of property passed along in the U.S. gets slapped with a vicious estate tax. This I believe is one of the things, indirectly, Obama mentioned in the debates when he talked about tax loopholes and how in America effectively some of the lowest tax rates are paid despite tax rates on paper. There are ways to bundle up your property in other legal entities and packages so that you do not have direct, personal ownership when tax time comes due.