Many people, for example, live better off returns from inherited assets than those who must depend on wages and salaries alone.

Having inherited assets and real estate, he bought more property, especially in rural Eidanger.

She contributed her inherited assets to the founding of the colony, and helped establish a school and a church.

However, using insurance proceeds to pay the insured's estate taxes effectively increases the beneficiary's estate since the beneficiary will not have to sell inherited assets to pay such taxes.

The new legislation will create another headache because heirs will have to determine how much their inherited assets have increased in value, to calculate the capital gains taxes owed when the assets are sold.

Mr. Astor had inherited assets heavily weighted in real estate, mostly hotels and apartment buildings in New York City, but over the years he shifted much of those investments into stocks.

There was some allowance made for this indirectly by assuming rather conservative lives for the inherited assets, and by the early 1950s, more of the higher postwar investment costs were also entering into the historic cost depreciation charges.

Jack Faris, president of the National Federation of Independent Business, which represents 600,000 privately owned businesses, said the federation had changed its original stance favoring outright repeal, and now, like Mr. Blethen, favored requiring capital gains taxes on inherited assets back to the original purchase price.

"We don't want our kids to have to struggle" to get an education, said Marlene Nixon, a registered nurse who immigrated from Grenada 23 years ago, adding that she and her husband "did not have a foundation much like a child who was born here, whose parents may have been born here, who inherited assets."