I don’t like that the state can take part of the wealth you’ve worked for after you die. But obviously laws to steal money from everybody else are popular.
Maybe we can compromise on you taking yourself to some remote spot cut off from a society and generating your wealth there? Then we can all be sure your gains are truly yours, and so nobody will mind you hoarding them.
This is nothing but double taxation. Ie highway robbery.
But yes, when a rich person gives their money to another person, that other person now has to pay tax. An estate, gift, or income tax.
Many rich people pay their employees, some don't; wage theft is very popular, as are other forms of labor exploitation. But an educated, healthy, available labor force is a very expensive asset to create. We all invest in creating that through things like paying for schools, health care, and raising children. One of the ways we pay for creating that asset is taxes. Rich people, as the ones most benefiting from society, and also as the ones with the most spare money, should pay their fair share for that.
EDIT: the point of raising it is in the context of this discussion, we are talking about the very wealthy. A $15,000 gift to their children isn't very much of a transfer as a percentage. To hand off large amounts of wealth to the next generation, for sure the annual gift exclusion isn't nearly enough to avoid inheritance taxes.
I was under the impression there's a large exemption for inheritances under a few million and then it's still a number lower than income tax on the rest.
Philosophically, you don't own anything after you're dead. Someone else, alive, is getting income in the form of an inheritance.
In any case, in the US the estate tax and the gift tax are basically the same thing, so rich people can give the same millions to their kids either before or after they die and pay basically the same taxes: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57272
Similarly, the rich person paid taxes and then their rich kids pay taxes on their inheritance.
No more double taxation, and everyone gets to do whatever they want with their post-tax income!
After all it's new income for them.
And if it did, then taxes would have been done a long time ago, because money in its endless circulation pays taxes all the time.
To emphasise this point, when an employer pays an employee wages, they pay it with a dollar that someone else earned (and paid tax on) and paid to them (and likely paid sales tax on). Money isn’t taxed, and neither are people; transactions are. An estate transfer is a transaction.
A house isn’t a person. Saying transactions, not people, are taxed doesn’t mean that only transactions are taxed.
* state sales sax on car * future city property tax on car * fed dividend tax on money used to pay for car * apple already paid state and fed corp income tax on money used to pay dividend * some person already paid income tax on money used to buy iphones/macs/chargers etc.
Is your position that the estate tax in particular is egregious or that all taxes are egregious? If you only want money to be taxed once then you'd have to redo all the taxes no?
If it is possible for taxation to be egregious, then at some point there must be a boundary which is crossed. How can we define what is a just amount of property to confiscate with our subjective judgment?
It is a moral issue in principle. In practice it amounts to whatever politicians can get away with. Ideologues present wealth as evidence of greed. Envy is celebrated. The person with a bigger slice of pie is blamed for other's perceptions of insufficient portions, as if markets represent a zero-sum game.
Cries of, "You didn't build that" are overly simplistic and misleading. If they were valid, collectives and central planners could produce surpluses without need for individualized incentives. Yet history tells us a different story.
That slice of pie which so many here seem unhappy with is much bigger than what was eaten in years before. This is the result of individual profit incentives, competition and innovation, not taxation or central planning.
If it is to be a moral issue, perhaps we should start from the point of not coercing others or violating their property rights?
> not coercing others or violating their property rights
Property rights always involve coercion, at least when you get beyond the basics of personal property. How does, say, Jeff Bezos own a variety of lavish properties across the country [1] when a half-million people in the US are homeless?
The short answer is that he depends on coercion. He expects that both private and state actors will coerce people into staying away from stuff he has claimed. Violently if necessary. And we're not even getting into the many flavors of coercion that underlie his enormous wealth.
The fundamentalist libertarian position always ends up in these sorts of incoherencies, because it makes ardent demands of a society it wants no part of otherwise.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-owns-five-massive...
As for Amazon, maybe look more closely at the government interventions in the financial markets. Yes, Bezos is an entrepreneurial figure. He is also symptomatic of an artificially supported economic system. The central bank injects liquidity. Financial markets acquire it first, and consumers are left with the inflation.
I would argue that large concerns like Amazon are enabled by the current paradigm. We could describe it as a tax by other means and price fixing of interest rates.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/amazon-borrows-%2410-billion...
As for libertarianism, observing that adds no more to the conversation than me calling you a socialist, statist or authoritarian.
Jokes aside, the rules of property are set up by society to encourage certain jointly beneficial outcomes. Money itself is an inherently social construct. (Imagine how far you'd get creating your own private currency that only you used.) And we are all temporary beings, here a little while and gone. Yes, some of the rules designate some of the property as yours to dispose of for the duration. Which is great! But make no mistake that these rules are contingent.
If tomorrow I hacked all the banks and land registries so I owned everything, people wouldn't say, "Well, I guess that's how it is now." The same is true if I did it technically within the rules. Everybody would make new rules. And they'd be right to. In the phrasing of James Carse, the current rules are the finite game, but like all finite games, the rules are generated by what he calls the infinite game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games
Coinbase and other places seem to facilitate private currencies.
To me it's silly to see how much unused land there is in the USA but people aren't allowed to use it because a few people showed up 150 years ago and claimed it for themselves. And when they did they stole it from other people. Now people are just supposed to respect that forever?
The rule against perpetuities only prevents you from constructing a zombie legal entity which outlives you permanently. Some places have a fixed, high time limit; many merely have the non-onerous rule that you can only leave it to people who were alive at the time of your death.
The reason they can build modern stuff is due to the work of billions of people networked in space and time (knowledge, processes & culture, tools, infrastructure) to which the "self-made rich person" has the extreme fortune to be able to build on (even today most people are born in places too far away to benefit equally from that network and are only able to access a tiny part of it, so no matter their own contribution they are lacking the base).
Tell me, why would a person whose accomplishments are ~99.99999% based on the work and accomplishments of others be allowed to monopolize it as if they were truly responsible for everything?
As far as I'm concerned the government should truly not be allowed to tax your entirely self-made mud hut disconnected from infrastructure in the middle of nowhere.
For all else, you benefit from gigantic network effects (in space: all other people alive making things, in time: everything we got from previous generations) and should pay your dues. Given that, even a very high tax rate especially after death is extremely generous. The descendants had even less to do with anything the person that sat in a perfect place in the human network accomplished by making use of their advantageous position (to be exact, zero). At most, their contribution is to be able to use said network very well - although it also happens a lot that they did so by preventing others from using it.
Wealth is the incentive for the wealth creation you're observing here.
In some cases it does make sense for employers to increase compensation. Especially when productivity is high. Usually productivity gains are a result of innovation, which is incentivized by the profit motive.
https://www.npr.org/2014/01/27/267145552/the-middle-class-to...
This just isn't true. I have entrepreneurs on both sides of family going back at least 3 generations. Many of them were happy just to create something and make a decent living.
As an example, look at Bob's Red Mill, a 500+ person company in Oregon. The owner recently turned the whole thing over to his employees: https://www.oregonlive.com/clackamascounty/2010/02/bobs_red_...
You could also look at worker-owned co-ops. In SF, Arizmendi is a very successful string of worker-owned bakeries: https://arizmendibakery.com/faq
Or take a look at the Zingerman's community of businesses in Ann Arbor, MI: https://www.zingermanscommunity.com/about-us/a-bit-of-zinger...
The founder, Ari Weinzweig very clearly doesn't give a shit about the profit incentive. I recommend his book, "A Lapsed Anarchist's Approach to Building a Great Business": https://www.zingermans.com/Product/zingermans-guide-to-good-...
I grant that part of corporate America's civic religion is pretending that greed is the only possible motivator for anything good. And maybe that's true for some people. But if you talk with actual entrepreneurs, especially ones outside the tech filter bubble, their true motivations are rarely about a chance at vast riches.
Keep in mind that death taxes may apply not only to what is inherited by family members, but charitable foundations created as well. Charity starts with the possibility of abundance.
That's definitely not true. The great bulk of people, who do the great bulk of the work of value creation, can't possibly be motivated by wealth, because definitionally they won't receive it.
There's also no reason to think that the ecommerce revolution wouldn't have happened without Bezos or some other person becoming a zillionaire. There are plenty of entrepreneurs who are happy as long as they get to make things happen and make decent money.
Absurd levels of wealth are an incentive for wealth concentration, not wealth creation. The creation of value would certainly happen without that. And generally happens better without it, which is why we have things like antimonopoly laws.
Ultimately, it's not a question of how deserving billionaires are (they obviously aren't). It's more a question of how to best advance the interests of our species as a whole.
Where do you see "two wrongs"? I don't understand this reply at all. I don't see the connection to what I actually wrote.
> Ultimately, it's not a question of how deserving billionaires are (they obviously aren't). It's more a question of how to best advance the interests of our species as a whole.
I agree, and I don't see any connection to what I wrote here either, meaning how this is supposed to be a contradiction to my point?