The rest of FIL's estate is in a trust that is split in half dependent on their age. The 40 acres was part of a family lot of originally 150 acres from two generations up.
We checked with an estate attorney - no taxes on the check or the land, but when husband and his sister "sold" the property to an aunt with far more kids than the other siblings had so it would be part of her parcel of the family land, we had to "pay" $122 in capital gains taxes that year on the sale of that land - even though for all intents and purposes, it was just signing over property amongst close family with an eye to the least amount of tax damage to all parties (Sister in law is married to a district branch bank manager, they were able to work it out for everyone involved).
Even when husband finally gets his half of the trust, under the current laws, there would not be any taxes levied on the transfer. Now, the next year's or subsequent taxes would be a pain - once we would have to record any interest or profit off the money, but receiving the money would not affect our income - state or federal - one bit.
Since we used our check as soon as we got it to pay off medical bills and purchase outright and renovate our current double-wide home-sweet-home, there was very little interest to add as income to the 1040 for the next year...however, if we had just tossed the money into our bank account and spent it as we wanted over the year, we would have had some tax liability just due to the interest - probably around $500 worth or so, but still.
The Estate tax is for multi-millionaires, not for middle class people or small businesses. In effect, it's pretty painless to the average person to inherit even $2 million in assets from someone else.
People always forget, it's not the money, it's the capital gains at the end of the year that gets the people who inherit.
Getting rid of the estate tax itself won't make a lick of difference to the middle class or those who inherit small businesses.
Estate recipients with no business experience or poor financial or legal advice will still have to sell the family business when they inherit it because of either faulty implementation of deductibles and exemptions that businesses can take, or the capital gains and other business fees and taxes that they weren't prepared to deal with - not because of the estate taxes themselves.
In fact, most people I know who complain about having to sell the family business or family property do so either because the business was leveraged to the max and the original owner owed not only taxes but penalties and fees that had to be resolved before the estate could be released, or because a few heirs want to sell their portion of the assets for the money right off the bat, and screw it up for the other heirs. The actual estate taxes have nothing to do with having to sell the business.
Haele
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