I don't know what your local / state is shafting you for, but the estate tax rhetoric is totally a put on by rich people.
Even if you leave your estate to your kids or grand kids, it's only £500K ($700K) and that is only if you're leaving the family home (another example the UK being obsessed with property ownership).
It's also payable by the recipient, not the executor of the will.
On the other hand, an inheritance tax is one of the few mechanisms I can think of to keep a wealth distribution at least somewhat under control. There's a constant accumulation of wealth at the top already anyway; re-distributing some of that back down the ladder when rich people die seems like a good idea.
It of course would make more sense if the (elusive) middle class was hardly taxed at all in this scenario, and the 1% a ton, but... that would of course upset a lot of people with a lot of power.
He could be actually slipping from middle-class as we speak.
[1]: https://americansfortaxfairness.org/tax-fairness-briefing-bo...
We aren't talking about "free riches" here, we are talking about keeping a country and society stable. And I'm convinced you can't do that without keeping inequality of all kinds -- income, wealth, education -- in check, because you'd cripple the country and ultimately end up with revolts otherwise, and probably justifiedly so.
Every individual benefits from the (infra)structure and stability that a country and society offers them, so pretending it's okay for someone to make millions by using those benefits and then turning their back and saying "yes but all this is now solely my own and taxation is theft" is kind of ridiculous.
Money going into government hands isn't exactly the same as redistributing it down the ladder, though.
Because of corruption?
It will still generally find itself in the hands of people with less wealth than the richest portion of society, but it almost always stops much higher than the bottom run.
The problem isn't that we don't tax rich people enough. It's that the way the system is built, rich people become black holes that suck in any wealth that enters their orbit. Once they have it, it's effectively locked away from everyone.
Taxes are one way to try and slow that down but it's clearly not a perfect solution and simply turning up the amount of tax isn't going to stop it.
The company employing you likely paid tax on the money it got, now it passes it to you as wages and you pay "another" tax. The same for investments. Why shouldn't you pay on inheritance? You haven't paid tax on that property before right?
And with an inheritance, the inheritors haven't done anything to deserve not to be taxed. Workers have worked, investors invested, inheritors are basically lottery winners.
People don't like how inheritance tax feels but its actually one of the most logical, fairest, least economically expensive taxes.
Since you didn't contribute anything for this house, why should it go to you? Why shouldn't it go back to society at large?
I understand that we've all grown with this cultural idea of legacy and inheritance, but I find it more and more problematic and morally unjustifiable as I get older. It just seems like as much as we try to create equal opportunities for all children, we keep around this massive inequality where children whose parents have more wealth pass it along and create privilege classes, giving some unfair advantages over others.
Already we see that the wealthier the parents the more successful the child, due to better education and care. To also have them inherit wealth they didn't amass themselves seems a tad too much in my opinion.
I can see some reasonable scenarios, like when the child is still a dependent, or leaving behind a certain amount of sentimental goods, but beyond that it seems unfair to me.
I tend to be very much aligned with the idea of equal opportunities, unequal outcomes. Each one of us should be able to compete on an even playing field with the rest for a bigger slice of the pie, and so if you contribute more to making the pie bigger you deserve a bigger slice and can enjoy it for yourself. Your kids though didn't, and shouldn't have unfair advantages of opportunities. Similarly, I think everyone deserves a minimum, which allows you to again have the necessary safety net to be able to equally compete with others. Traditionally this safety net has been provided through these inheritance schemes and the parents you have determined if you get a safety net or not.
Here's some literature around it:
* http://www.ditext.com/current/0022.html#:~:text=No%2C%20Hasl....
* https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/why-do-...
It also appears that Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson similarly were against inheritance, or at least struggled to fit it in a capitalist model.
That's the wrong way to look at it. The former (deceased) owner of the house did contribute to it. It belonged to her and she had every right to dispose of it as she wished. That includes giving it away to someone else of her choosing upon her death. It's not the recipient's property rights that are being infringed upon here, but rather the donor's. The only thing "unfair" about this situation is that the effort of earning and deferring consumption and investing which the deceased put into acquiring the property is being stolen by uninvolved parties who contributed nothing toward it for their own enrichment contrary to the explicit wishes of the owner, and not left to the beneficiary the owner intended.
That's a moral argument, but the issue with moral arguments is they can be made in every direction just as easily.
For example, Thomas Jefferson said:
"A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural."
And Smith said: "There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death."
Morally speaking, the founding fathers were against inheritance and the right of one person to be binding over future generations after their death.
- https://www.economist.com/lexingtons-notebook/2010/10/14/you...
Morally I agree with this, as I can't really see the justification for it. But as I said before, that's the issue with moralist arguments, they can be made both ways. So I'm more interested in practical aspects, maybe inheritance is actually responsible for greater wealth inequality, free market inneficiencies, political instability, and other downsides, but maybe it has upsides as well, though more and more I'm starting to see it as a net negative personally.
Haslett argues the practical angle pretty well, summarized here: http://www.ditext.com/current/0022.html
I recommend reading it, it's a short read.
As for Smith, here we'll just have to disagree. I find it beyond bizarre that anyone would claim that a person has the right to dispose of their property as they wish at any point before death, but not at the moment they die. That distinction is nothing but the most trivial technicality.
Did you read the article I linked? Cause that doesn't seem to be the case. He repealed the laws of primogeniture and entail, and he himself quoted Smith, showing that he was in agreement with Smith.
And confirmed here as well:
> Some founders wanted to eliminate inheritance entirely. In a letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson suggested that all property be redistributed every fifty years, because "the earth belongs in usufruct to the living." Madison gently pointed out the plan's impracticality. Benjamin Franklin unsuccessfully pushed for the first Pennsylvania constitution to declare concentrated wealth "a danger to the happiness of mankind."
From https://origins.osu.edu/history-news/death-taxes-and-america...
The article that you linked was behind a paywall, but I read as much of the intro as I was able.
Jefferson himself was mostly anti-property in general, as your quote about redistributing all property every 50 years shows, but that was a fringe position among the founders.
Jefferson, Franklin, John Adam, Hamilton, Washington, Madison, all seem to have some quotes referring to this. And Paine, Smith, Tockevile which were all influential thinkers similarly.
In general I feel the consensus of that stackexchange answer seems right to me:
> Although quotes from founding fathers directly addressing an estate tax are scarce, it is commonly argued in related articles that they did not want a privileged aristocracy; and that they believed individuals should achieve wealth through merit and hard work, not inheritance. The founding fathers were rebelling against empires that had large concentrations of power, generational wealth, and class status that was earned through birth rather than labor
So while there's no way to know where precisely they'd land on the matter of abolishing inheritance, it seems pretty clear to me they'd at least have some concerns over any form of inheritance schemes or other schemes that allows wealth to be acquired or transferred without risk and/or labor.
But again, what the founding fathers would think don't make it best, we can value their hindsight, but we should be able to argue for our positions on its own as well.
Morally there is the natural right to property, which neither of us disagrees with. But I consider the right to transfer your right to someone else problematic, in that, once you choose to let go of your property, I'm not sure you own it anymore, and don't get to decide who it goes too similarly.
Also, your natural right to property is conditional on having acquired it fair and square. If you stole it for example, it doesn't count. In my opinion, within the value framework of capitalism, that would extend to if you didn't earn it it doesn't count, and I don't see how inheritance can be defended as having earned it. Same goes for having it be gifted to you. Anything outside the markets shouldn't count as earning it in my opinion. You got to show up for it with merit and hard work, which the markets are a measure of.
So schemes where you can acquire wealth by birth or blood association, or by friendship or courting, they seem immoral to me.
And on a non-moral angle, from a practical standpoint, I do feel it hinders free markets, optimal competition, and societal stability. Now I reckon it would be tricky to get rid off now, and finding the replacement strategy will be challenging as well, some alternatives could be worse, so we'd need to be careful, etc. But basically because of all I just said I've started to rethink this whole inheritance thing.
And maybe like Theodore Roosevelt of the Republican Party did a while back, a graduated estate tax is the best solution, and we should revise it to today's proportions and inflation. As he said:
> We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have been gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community … The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and … a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.
Though I'm not as onboard with the graduated income tax, some amount of it as needed to provide the minimum of opportunity to others, but beyond that if you earned it, you deserve it. That said, gifting it to others or transferring it to heirs or friends or spouses, that doesn't sound merited to me.