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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

Not just educational outcomes. More money has massively diminishing returns to happiness, health, fitness, longevity, creative output, ...

The biggest constraint is often individual people’s time/attention; additional money is only slightly (if at all) helpful for the already rich.

But a little bit of money goes a long way to help people who are not eating well, don’t have a place to live, need to work 3 stressful part-time jobs to make ends meet, ...

Massive inheritances (dropping someone tens of millions of dollars or more) are one of the greatest problems in our society. The top marginal tax rate for inheritances should be 90%+, and we should be cracking down hard on all the sneaky ways people hide gajillions of dollars for their descendants. Maybe with an exception for small family farms, since presenting farmer sob stories is one of the biggest ways billionaires have figured out to market their intergenerational hoarding.

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I do not see inheritance as a problem. My motivation for accumulating wealth is largely driven by a desire to provide for my future family members.

Inheritance tax is theft.

Not paying taxes is theft from the society that lets you accumulate and keep wealth.

And personal property is theft too, eh comrade?

I don’t think anyone is saying avoid taxes entirely. I honestly don’t see why money should be taxed twice. Take income tax, fine, but if I decide to save money for my descendants then let me be. On its face it’s literally just a gift.

The "double taxation" argument is nonsense. There are many taxes that apply to the same money multiple times. I have to pay income tax on the money when I get it, sales tax when I use it to buy something with it and then property tax on the thing that I bought. (Also, gifts and inheritances are taxed identically).

Not sure why the parent is being downvoted; it's just as mypopically black and white as the GP. Wealth accumulation is inarguably a two-way street, where a well-functioning society with dependable economic infrastructure enables people to accumulate wealth and contribute to the economy which further develops that infrastructure.

And when you are taxed for services you dont use, or are used against you, what is your recourse?

Money is generally taxed anytime it changes hands so an inheritance tax seems fine to me. Although, a 90% one would be ridiculous.

Also, if you are in the US, the estate tax is now $11.18 million per taxpayer (so 22 million for a couple) due to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. As a result, only approximately 2,000 people (or 0.0006% of the population) in the US are currently liable for estate tax [0] so you should be fine unless you already have fuck you money at which point it doesn't really matter because again, you have fuck you money.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_State...

> if you are in the US, the estate tax is now $11.18 million per taxpayer

I think you mean estate tax exemption.

Oops, wrong wording. You are correct, you are only taxed on any money passed down after the first 11.18 million.

"My motivation for accumulating wealth is largely driven by a desire to provide for my future family members. inheritance tax is theft."

So its bad because it would hurt you.

This is the problem. The way you think. Estate taxes could pay for services that help the poor and inprove our society as a whole. But you're only concerned with making sure your own kids get out ok.

But thats your job as a parent. I get it. You see a dog eat dog world out there, and you wanna get your kids out alive. But just why are we so scared? Why is everyone fighting over scraps?

"Hurts me is bad" is an excellent line of reasoning; I can hardly imagine a valid reproach. You can't dictate to another person that what hurts them is good.

> But you're only concerned with making sure your own kids get out ok.

I can't speak for grandparent, but I'm concerned with all the kids getting their rightful inheritance from all their respective parents, not only my kids.

That said, I don't think there is anything wrong with providing for your kids and not others.

There is nothing “rightful” about a 100 million dollar inheritance (or whatever). Just like there is nothing “rightful” about inheriting a royal throne. Money is an arbitrary social convention, and wealth is generated by the whole society not by single individuals.

Inheritances that provide centuries of descendants with a work-free life and the power/influence to corrupt the government make a grotesque mockery of our society / politics.

The main reason there is nothing rightful about inheriting a royal throne is that there is nothing rightful about holding it in the first place.

That's the point: there's nothing self-evidently "rightful" about holding $100m either, and there are multiple political/economic systems practiced today that would consider it unjust.

"all the kids getting their rightful inheritance from all their respective parents, not only my kids."

Some kids dont get an inheritance. Some get a huge one. None of it is "rightful"... Its not deserved. Its not based on need or on merit. Its based on who your parents are. There are few things less democratic.

"That said, I don't think there is anything wrong with providing for your kids and not others."

In the context of widening inequality, your sentence should read "at the expense of others". Im not opposed to inheritance per say but it should be highly taxed.

Some kids with a rich parent also don't get an inheritance; the faithful butler gets everything. It's not necessarily true that there is no element of merit.

> There are few things less democratic.

Many of them are important to be that way: like who is permitted to enter your home; who gets to touch you and so on. Should that all be more democratic?

The modern sense of "democracy" refers to concepts like constitutional representation and controlled use of force.

If a mob decides that access to your pockets should be open to everyone, that is not democracy in the modern sense.

Attach whatever label to it you want. The only thing that matters is whether it makes society happier overall. It certainly makes you unhappy, but the people who receive the money are made happy, and histories have shown us the stratified societies that result from a lot of hereditary wealth/position are less happy than the ones with high social mobility. You might think this is unfair. Being born in an underclass in a stratified society is unfair too.

If you really believe in individual sovereignty, a society that maximizes social mobility should be inherently attractive to you. The John Galt type that the right idealizes would have been nothing if he'd been born an untouchable in pre-British India.

That being said, I recognize that a tax would discourage some people from being as productive as they might otherwise be. At the same time, I suspect that many people will work harder under more fair conditions. It's hard to say what the net effect will be.

Of course, if you have other ideas for promoting a fair society with social mobility along with realistic methods of paying for them, I'm happy to hear them.

Even if you taxed estates at 100% you wouldn't contribute any meaningful amount of money compared to total government revenue or expenditures. So let's be honest, it's about punishing wealthy people (and accepting all the downsides to society of doing that), not actually helping people.

The point is not the amount of revenue. The point is that having billion-dollar inheritances creates incredibly skewed political incentives which end up leading to significant harms.

If they taxed the estates at a high marginal rate with no gaping loopholes, auctioned off all the assets thereby recovered by the government, and then just zeroed out the bits representing the dollars in the resulting accounts, that would be just fine with me.

Ultra ultra wealthy people are not being “punished” by having their estates taxed at a steep top marginal rate. The great-great-grandchildren of industry titans do not have a preordained right to massive wealth at the whole society’s expense. Money is a social construct, and can and should be designed to work for all of us.

In a functioning society with a growing (or even stagnant) economy, each generation should inherit a greater wealth of public infrastructure, capital, services, knowledge, ... than the previous one. Instead, in our society there is an incentive for public officials to transfer collective assets to individual aristocrats in corrupt deals, to underfund/destroy public institutions, to take out loans guaranteed by the state and pocket the money, etc., impoverishing the next generation. This amounts to basically theft/fraud against the polis.

Unless I've read the figures wrong, a 100% estate tax could provide around 1/6th of government expenditure in the UK. This would be a meaningful amount of money.

Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/inheritance-tax-sta...

Nah. Rich farmers deserve little sympathy. The traditional farm evokes by pictures on milk cartons and politicians has been dead since the 80s.

Pick a number around the 80th percentile of 401k balance at age 70 and tax it at 50%, then go up to 95%.

The kickback to this modern gilded age is going to be brutal.

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