I’m no stranger to political lies; I grew up hearing some of the same ones the GOP is telling today. One of those lies conservatives told me was about the estate tax, sometimes called an inheritance tax.

Most nations have some form of this levy. The general idea is that very large inheritances are taxed as they’re passed from one generation to the next. No one knows when the concept of inheritance was invented, but today it’s considered “natural” that a dying person should be able to pass on her wealth to to descendants (or other heirs if she chooses), even though those heirs didn’t earn that wealth. As both a parent and a child, it seems like a decent concept. But at some point inheritances began to grow to absurd amounts, with dying magnates passing along hundreds of millions — and eventually billions of dollars to their offspring. Governments looking for revenue sought to tax these estates, very slightly at first.

I first heard the term “estate tax” when I was a teen; conservatives around me had been worked into a lather over it. I asked what it was. Some called it a “death tax” (which is actually a term used in the tax code). Others explained it was a heinous plan by “communist liberals” to make sure that no matter how hard a person worked, she couldn’t pass any wealth on to her offspring. Examples given were always “hardworking farmers” or middle class parents. It was described to me in a way that made me think that I, personally, would receive little or no inheritance due to this crazy plan by Democrats. Not a single person in those years told me the truth about estate taxes, and I suspect this is because they didn’t themselves know what the tax actually did.

There are two major facts omitted in my early knowledge of estate/inheritance taxes, and both of these facts, when I learned them, completely changed my view on this topic. I didn’t learn them until well into adulthood.

The first is that almost no one is affected by estate taxes. This is because in the U.S. estate taxes don’t take effect unless an estate is very, very large. At the time I first discovered this, the amount was a million or two dollars. Only one person I have ever known personally stood to inherit anything close to this amount. (She is another story, which I might write someday.) But now the amount is more than $11 million (more than $22 million for married couples). I’m fairly certain I’ve never known anyone personally with an estate so valuable. According to experts, “less than one-tenth of 1 percent” (and I think he meant “fewer than”) of all estates are effected by it now. Some sources estimate fewer than 2,000 estates in the U.S. would pay any estate tax under the newest exclusion amount.

The second fact is closely related. Not only are no taxes collected on any estates smaller than the aforementioned amounts, but those amounts are exempt even on larger estates. If your estate is one dollar higher than the cutoff amount, you’re not suddenly taxed on the entire amount. No, you’re just taxed on that one dollar. If your estate is twice the excluded amount, you’re only taxed on the second half. The first half remains untaxed, as it would for someone whose estate is below the cutoff amount.

Put together, these two facts entirely destroyed any argument anyone had ever made to me about the “death tax”. No, it wouldn’t affect small-town struggling farmers. No, it wouldn’t affect middle class families. They also used to tell me such taxes discourage people from becoming wealthy (and some of them still believe this!), which can’t possibly be true because the wealthy people still get to keep (untaxed) the entire bottom amount that’s excluded from the estate tax, as well as a good portion of the part that is taxed.

Granted, a handful of states also (according to the non-partisan Tax Foundation) have estate taxes on top of the federal estate tax. But note that all of them also have an excluded amount, so that any inheritance under that amount isn’t taxed at all. Most of them have variable rates (much like the federal government); only the very largest estates are taxed at the top rate. None of the state I’ve lived in since I was a toddler have an estate or inheritance tax.

Now that I’ve found my way past the lies, I can appreciate a plan that Senator Bernie Sanders has recently floated. He wants to (1) roll back the 2017 changes imposed by Republicans, changing the cutoff amount to a much lower $3.5 million, (2) change the rates. He proposes a 45% rate on estates just over $3.5 million and a much stiffer 77% rate on estates larger than $1 billion. He also mentioned closing some loopholes currently used by the very wealthy to get out of paying this tax. The editorial board of The Washington Post has endorsed this plan, saying:

“Mr. Sanders estimates that his plan would raise $315 billion over a decade. That revenue is badly needed. Federal debt as a share of the economy has spiked. Rising generations face huge challenges paying for the health care and pensions of their retiring parents. Meanwhile, the very wealthiest Americans have done extremely well in recent decades, with a drift toward an ever-higher concentration of national wealth at the top. Weak inheritance taxes have contributed to this trend.”

I too support the plan, at least in its general idea if not in every specific detail, and possibly for different reasons than either The Post or Sen. Sanders. Personally, I think there is an amount greater than which literally no one is entitled to. I’m not yet certain what that amount is, but I believe it theoretically exists. At current dollar values, I would probably engage my highest estate tax rate around $50 million and the rate would be higher than Sanders suggests, probably 90%. Wealth-hoarding has been a human sickness since we invented the twin ideas of wealth and inheritance — and it’s a greater problem now than in most periods in history. Every dollar hoarded by the very wealthy is a dollar that isn’t in circulation, isn’t available for lifting up the poor, fighting cancer, combating climate change, paying for education or infrastructure, and so on. Opulence is theft.

Regardless of why I think it’s good idea, and regardless of what rate is eventually settled on, what is painfully clear is that I was lied to about the estate tax during my younger years, perhaps unwittingly by some. Conservatives and libertarians are still telling these same lies today. Perhaps the most ironic argument they still use is: “People should not be punished because they work hard”, which implies that the wealth is all or mostly the result of the owner’s hard work. Not only do we know that much of the world’s wealth is the result of inheritance, dividends, interest, and rents, but even the wealth that is derived from work comes from the labor of the laborer, not that of the capitalist. So why indeed, we may ask in return, are we punishing people for working hard, by refusing to pay them the fruits of their labors?

I welcome legitimate discussions about the efficacy of the estate tax, how high the cutoff should be, and what rates are most effective. But instead we aren’t having the discussion because one side is still lying about it.