DEI is how the upper quantile has co-opted economic justice rhetoric while entrenching itself in economic sectors (finance, tech) and behind policies (immigration) that deepen economic divides. It’s Wall Street’s brilliant makeover (in response to 2008), which has created a national conversation wherein being a racist plumber in Michigan is somehow worse than working in private equity.
It’s immaterial what educated professionals purport to believe in. Politics isn’t just about supporting this policy or that policy. It’s about how you spend political capital to construct a majority coalition that can manifest policies. Upper quantile professionals have spent their political capital to create a majority capable of enacting their preferred social policies. When they wage trench warfare to make sure kids learn about race in history class, that’s political capital they didn’t spend making sure kids learn about the history of the labor movement. These are choices. And as a result of those choices, upper quantile professionals have created a Democratic Party that includes Wall Street, but excludes much of the working class (and excludes most of the white working class). As a result, that coalition is wholly incapable of addressing economic inequality.
Your comment suggesting that losing 68% after 100 years is similar to keeping 0% is very strange to me, those don't seem similar at all. And then the 68% doesn't even account for growth, which has always been greater than inflation in the past.
Generally the idea that people 100 years from now should be able to live off the labor their ancestors did 100+ years ago seems absurd to me. Those people did nothing to deserve that wealth.
OK, how about this: I pay zero taxes in my lifetime, and then government can take 25% of the estate after I die. What do you think of that?
In the end the government has to be funded somehow, the only question is how? Taking money from those who did not earn it seems the best option to me.
You're assuming your family is entitled to keep forever everything that it happens to have received in its economic activities.
Elizabeth Warren famously said in her first Senate campaign, "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did." [0]
In his book The Economists' Hour, NY Times economics columnist Binyamin Appelbaum argues that free-market icon Milton Friedman "celebrated drivers and took roads [and cars and gasoline and ....] for granted." [1]
Some would doubtless argue that the "free market" takes care of all this via pricing. But the "free market" really isn't; companies strive mightily, and often successfully, to seize pricing power and use it to extract rents.
[0] https://newrepublic.com/article/95247/elizabeth-warren-class...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Economists-Hour-Prophets-Markets-Frac...
That would be ignoring income taxes and VAT. And I'm well aware of the failures of the free market. But they do not make inheritance illegitimate, as this article tries to frame it.
It's that framing that is most offensive, more than a reasonable (i.e. much much less than 25%) inheritance tax: that taxation is not a compromise between property rights and free trade on one hand, and the public good on the other, with both being desirable values that are sometimes in opposition, but that it is a punishment for unearned wealth. With the hate for the wealthy expanded far beyond the 1%, to everyone that bought a house before the housing market explosion.
I'm sure if the target of this hateful rhetoric was some other group, you'd quickly see its danger.