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Comment by okintheory | Hacker News Reader

There's a big thing missing from this picture: If you have $ 1 billion, then you will eventually have $ 10 billion (40 yrs of 6 % returns), and your kid could easily end their life with $ 100 billion (add 40 more yrs). Is that ok?

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Why wouldn’t it be OK? They pay their income tax every year, legally, why should the government get even more of their money? The whole estate tax thing has always bothered me, the government double dipping on your money and acting like someone looking to profit from people’s death.

Well, there is nothing bad/good necessarily, but it doesn't really feel right imo. How is it fair for somebody to benefit from something without having worked for it? There is a baseline level of providing for children, providing education, providing housing, caring, etc. but such high levels of wealth being passed on makes no sense and is just obscene. The estate tax doesn't really effect many people, only an extremely small subset (some quick googling shows that over 11 million has to be passed down). Also, the estate tax also exists to prevent things like landed gentries. Nobody wants a society of rent seekers.

The whole stock market is built on the premise that you don’t have to work for the company to benefit from its success. Why is a family’s success any different? If a parent works hard, makes money, pays his taxes and wants to give that money to a child, it seems obscene to me that the government steps in and takes yet another cut of the money.

The parent paid their income taxes on the money already. I believe in his death he owes capital gains on his stock holdings. So all the money that’s passed down has been taxed fairly already.

I don't know if the stock market comparison holds because when investing, there is a large amount of risk. Inheriting a lot of money is riskless on the person receiving the inheritance.

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