The reason for the estate tax is to recapture capital gains that get eliminated when a person dies

Ooh, no, gotta disagree with you there. Here's an easy counterexample for you: Imagine your parent inherited $5,000,000, and chose to keep it in a checking account for fifty years. Basically, that's like stuffing cash in the mattress, but with a bank involved. At the end of that time, your parent dies, having earned $0 in capital gains–but owing over $1,000,000 in estate tax.

If the purpose of estate tax were to recapture capital gains, then that's what would be taxed. Instead, the tax is based on every asset the decedent owned, regardless of how much or how little it had been taxed before.

And yes, that money does get taxed. The death tax is not the first time those stocks are taxed.

Wrong. I hold stocks that have been transferred several times through death and have never been taxed. The reason for the estate tax is to recapture capital gains that get eliminated when a person dies. When you inherit a stock, you inherit it at the basis of the date of death, not the date of purchase. My Exxon-Mobile stock as actually Standard Oil stock granted in the 1920's. If I had to accept the basis when it was granted, I'd pretty much have to pay capital gains on the entire price of the stock, not the gains I've seen since holding it. Instead, all of the value that Standard Oil/Esso/Exxon/Exxon-Mobil gained in the last eighty years was simply wiped away by my mother's death. Think that company might have made some gains in the last eighty years? And nobody ever had to pay taxes on those gains. And nobody paid any estate tax on it, either. Any estate worth less than $100 million can easily be made to look like it's worth less than $1 million. It's pretty amazing what foreign bank accounts and gold holdings can do. The key is not having a big house, because you can't hide that. Any estate worth over $100 million can simply be wrapped into a corporation to avoid the estate tax. And even if you do screw up and face the estate tax, you have 14 years to pay it with no penalties. Conservatives like to rename the estate tax as the "Death Tax", but they are wrong. It's really the Stupidity Tax. If your accountant is stupid enough to let you pay it, than you need a better accountant.

You obviously don't have enough money to even talk about this. So why are you so worried about it? Plan on wining the lottery?