Chris

Fair point in your case. In mine, as things stand when I am mortgage free I am likely to have an asset worth about 2.5 - 3x the total I’ve paid in mortgage and interest on 3 houses over about 35 years. And I am no DIY fan. All I’ve ever done is maintenance, I’ve never done anything deliberately to improve any house I’ve lived in.

At a population level my point stands. There is a vast, vast pool of unearned wealth in primary residences that are exempt from capital gains and are in real terms worth enormously more than when their owners purchased them. Our generation, and our parents, absolutely have coined it in, not only from the cash value of our homes increasing but from spells of inflation in the 1980s and again today, inflating away the mortgage burden.

The only sort of tax anyone ever pays on any of this is stamp duty, although this is a tax on purchase of property, not a tax on the value of the one they’re selling.

Notwithstanding any of the above, the abolition of inheritance tax wouldn’t have a revolutionary effect on you or me. It would however make a massive difference to the super-rich few, who already enjoy a great deal of unearned privilege thanks in no small regard to unearned wealth. The real societal benefit of a functional inheritance tax regime isn’t the amount of money it brings in in any given year but in its capacity to limit the development of a society where power and influence is concentrated in the hands of those whose great grandparents did something worthwhile.