Then the heirs lose out, they probably won't like that too much, nor will the pending decedents be happy knowing that a big chunk of their estate is going to be seized. I don't see how this is going to really make higher taxes more palatable.
Nobody likes paying taxes. It's literally never a pleasurable or enjoyable experience. Yet it's one that furthers society and allows it to do things like fund schools - a chronic problem in California.
Not disagreeing with your points, but one major reason that it's "never a pleasurable experience" to pay tax in America is that ideologues deliberately designed the process to be as painful as possible, to give taxation a bad name. Sadly, it's working.
If parents bought a home in CA in 1980 for $300k, and then did little more than regular upkeep and minor improvements, and then die in 2021, why should their offspring be entitled to a $10M windfall? They've done nothing to earn it, besides being lucky to be born to parents who were lucky enough to be able to buy housing in an area that they were lucky enough to keep living in when that area became popular.
> I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, "that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living": that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.
(Though really, even before I knew of Jefferson's attitudes about inherited wealth, I'd read enough to know that divesting children of unearned windfalls isn't necessarily a bad thing. Can't take it with you, ya know.)