If your house is worth more than 500k and you're inheriting from your parents, otherwise 325k. That's a pretty absurd amount of money to be getting tax free. Like, assuming 50% marginal you'd need to earn 1mn to get that post tax.
The home you have lived in and shared with your parents for, 27 years (the current and increasing average "moving out of home" age), could be considered as much yours as theirs.
You are not "earning" something you are continuing to "own" something that was already yours, shared with people who were here and are no longer here.
> The home you have lived in and shared with your parents for, 27 years (the current and increasing average "moving out of home" age), could be considered as much yours as theirs.
I only spent about twenty two years in my parent's house (well less, because we moved), but you're making an emotive argument while I was arguing more from a data-driven point of view.
The Irish inheritance tax is more generous to children (325k euro per child is tax free), but even in the UK, my three siblings and I would have paid zero tax. And our inheritance is quite large, lots of people in the UK & Ireland inherit much less.
Like, the ONS data[0] (which covers 2014-16) suggests that most inheritences go to the top quintile in terms of income (which anecdotally matches my experience) so this is a tiny, tiny problem in societal terms.
I get that inheritance tax is very emotive (particularly around family homes), but given that the vast majority of wealth is in property (except for that of the 0.1%), then I think inheritance tax is a pretty good one, and am happy that it's something that my kids will have to worry about, assuming we're lucky enough to leave them anything.
For context, I regard inherited wealth as mostly unfair, as the children of successful people have often had lots of advantages afforded to them already, so I'm not sure why those advantages should compound over generations.
Note: the ONS statistics are weird, talking about inheritances and gifts interchangeably and the numbers seem far too low. Figure 7 shows the unfairness clearly, IMO.
