The House legislation, backed by the Republican leadership and President Trump, would, starting in 2018, double the size of estates exempt from taxation to $10.98 million from the current level of $5.49 million. It would repeal the tax altogether at the end of 2023. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, for the tiny percentage of the population that benefits from such immense estates, the value of the tax cut would grow steadily from $1.3 billion in 2018 to $38 billion in 2027.

Jason Furman, a professor of economics at Harvard’s Kennedy School who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017, emailed his response to my inquiry about the impact of the bill on households with different incomes:

The House tax bill would lead to substantial redistribution from the middle-class to high-income households. Moreover, the particular form of the high-income tax cuts is designed to reward and perpetuate wealth in several respects. Much of the corporate rate cut would provide a windfall for the returns on capital investments that have already been made. Going forward, much of the effect of the plan would be to reduce the tax on monopoly rents — often to negative effective rates which means taxpayers would be subsidizing corporations.

The House bill would repeal the estate tax, Furman wrote, and it “would also retain the step-up-basis loophole that even” President George W. Bush’s

estate tax repeal would have eliminated. This would mean that not only are estates not taxed but that much of capital gains could permanently escape taxation, substantially increasing dynastic wealth accumulation.

The estate tax has been under assault by Republicans in Congress for more than four decades. According to a paper published on Nov. 2 by Isabelle Sawhill and Eleanor Krause of the Brookings Institution, the estate tax currently applies to “a tiny fraction of American estates — about 2 out of every 1000 deaths,” compared with “the 1970s, when there were over 70 taxable estates for every 1000 deaths.”

While income inequality is high in the United States — the World Economic Forum ranked us 29th out of 30 developed countries in 2017 — wealth inequality is much greater.

In “Deconstructing Household Wealth Trends in the United States, 1983-2013,” Edward N. Wolff, an economist at N.Y.U., calculates that the Gini coefficient measuring wealth distribution increased from 0.799 in 1983 to 0.871 in 2013. The Gini coefficient measuring income distribution increased from 0.480 to 0.574 over the same period. (The Gini coefficient is a gauge of economic inequality ranging from 0 to 1.0, with 0 representing perfect equality and 1.0 representing perfect inequality.)

While proposing to eliminate the estate tax altogether, the House bill would retain a provision in current law — the step-up in basis — that effectively wipes out all tax liability for heirs on the increased value of assets at the time of death. Forbes declared, “this is a tax cut for the rich,” and described what would happen using the step-up in basis if you died with an estate that had grown in value from $10 million to $100 million:

There would be no estate tax, and your heirs could sell the stock right after your death and owe no capital gains taxes on the $90 million gain.

Many of the very richest Americans have children who stand to benefit enormously if the proposed tax bill is enacted. The list of these billionaires includes Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, Larry Ellison, Charles Koch, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Phil Knight, Carl Icahn, Pierre Omidyar, David Koch, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Sheldon Adelson, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, George Soros, and, of course, Donald Trump.