Even putting aside the claims used to galvanize support for cutting the estate tax, the Trump administration would be wise to consider that this might not be the time to go through with an expensive tax cut that only benefits a handful of America’s wealthiest families. This tax cut would coincide with the growing awareness of wealth inequality in the United States, where the top one-tenth of 1 percent have as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. This inequality has only become more skewed in recent years. After substantial declines in wealth inequality from 1937 to 1977, the share of wealth going to the richest 0.1 percent has nearly tripled, from 8 percent in 1980 to 22 percent in 2012—the highest it’s been since 1917. This may not be the best political or economic environment to propose a tax cut that over 10 years gives $269 billion to only 5,000 of the wealthiest inheritors each year.

The facts do not even indicate that the 5,000 estates that pay some estate tax (out of 2.7 million deaths each year) are significantly burdened by it. While this mysteriously remains a top priority from some leading farm and small-business lobbies, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that only 50 farms or closely-held family businesses in the U.S. will pay any estate taxes in 2017—working out to an effective tax rate of less than 6 percent on each of those estates. And while the 40 percent estate-tax rate might seem high to some, it’s only applied to the amount passed down beyond the $11 million per couple, leaving the effective rate much lower. Consider that the Tax Policy Center estimates that the average effective tax rate for estates meeting the tax threshold is 17 percent, and that even the rare $20 million estate that took advantage of no deductions, exemptions, or loopholes would not pay more than an effective rate of 18 percent. If the estate tax is repealed, large amounts of accumulated wealth would go untaxed forever. As Chye-Ching Huang and Chloe Cho of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities have written, when it comes to the very wealthiest families in the United States, “unrealized capital gains account for a significant proportion of the assets held by estates.” Studies have shown that 55 percent of the value of estates worth over $100 million are never-taxed gains.

There is also is evidence that repealing the estate tax will be a tougher sell as more Americans come to understand how the estate tax really works. A prominent study published in the American Economic Review found that providing Americans with the facts about who actually pays such taxes raises support for increasing it. When the study’s authors told participants the threshold for the tax’s application, the number of Americans currently wealthy enough to have to pay it, and how unlikely they were to ever have to worry about it, support for a higher estate tax more than doubled. This is noteworthy since economists, including University of Michigan’s Joel Slemrod, have found that public opposition to the estate tax can be partially explained by misconceptions about who is subject to it.