anything paid to folks in the will becomes a clever tax dodge
Anything up to 5.49 million or so, double if it is from a couple. After that it is taxed at 40%. There are estimates that only about 0.2% of people have to pay. But for a few families (like Trump's) 5 million is nothing and the tax is huge.
Very interesting thing from a few years back: Republicans in Congress were willing to go from 5 million to 3 million exemption if they could get a few percentage points shaved of the amount in excess. If you do the math and figure out who that benefits, it is people with over 100 million dollar estates. It shows very clearly who they work for! People with just 3-5 million dollar estates are bums to them. They were willing to sell them down the river in spite of all their talk about poor ranchers and small business owners.
