Estate Planning - Is There a Way to Avoid the Estate Tax?

The practical incidence of the tax, given the fact that there's a 40 year difference from the time of its imposition and a huge difference in the amount of wealth that can be transferred beforehand, it's basically a tax depending on how old you are. And it seems to me that taxes like that just don't make any kind of sense. What you want people to do is to say when they pay taxes, I'm paying taxes because I've been better off with the system that has generated it.