Never understood the view that you are entitled to keep all of your money and do whatever you want with it. You benefit from a government and it needs funding, and taxes are the price of admission. Complain about rates all you want, but the idea of an estate tax is simple and makes sense. Wouldn’t you rather pay up more when you die than pay more along the way, allowing you to enjoy/grow your money in your lifetime?
Crying because a beneficiary only gets 60% of whatever the starting number was is pathetic, its an entitlement issue and nothing more.
Agree on the comments about how money will largely avoid this, I see it daily and its amazing (and amazingly conflicting)
Trust fund kids also have a spectacular record of blowing their inheritance. Does anyone really think the BSD’s on here are buying enough watches to keep Patek Philippe afloat? If it weren’t for trust fund kids buying luxury goods like there’s not tomorrow, we’d all be stuck wearing Timex and driving Yugos.
This point is key and doesn’t seem to be discussed much in Washington.
It seems people don’t mind earning less as long as the rich earn much less.
I guess if you think you and the poor would be better off if you closed the disparity in wealth, the piece of the pie argument, I understand the desire to close the gap. I don’t believe it will help anyone and that should not be the goal. Just because somebody has 50 Billion doesn’t mean I can’t create my own wealth. I say tax in way that minimizes the effect on GDP and then distribute the funds as you see fit. Worry about meeting the needs of the people rather than focusing on the rich. I don’t understand why the gap matters. The gap will grow larger as an economy grows. Shrink the economy and the gap narrows as it did during the great depression. The gap would have narrowed drastically in 2009, but the government decided to prop up the wealthy and not allow the little guy to pick up the pieces.
The legacy wealth from America’s early rich is minuscule compared to the wealth accumulated in the last few decades and in a hundred years the legacy of today’s rich will be just a fraction of the new wealth. The grand kids always shrink the estate. That consumption is great for the rest of us.
I die with a $100 million and give it to my son. Option A is to take $40 million out of the inheritance he gets or B not tax the inheritance but make up that $40 million by additional taxes on income for all people. Considering the person receiving the inheritance did not get it from economic forces like the wage earners did, it probably makes sense to leave the wage earner with as much as possible by offsetting their tax with an estate tax.
canada doesn’t have an estate tax because we get taxed to death while we’re alive. you either pay while living or pay when dead. you can’t have neither. looking at economic disparity between the two countries, i’d hazard to guess that taxing while living is more effective and creates a more equal society.
that said, the republican base’s mission is to destroy society for their benefit and they have no long-term vision, though the dem’s are all that great either. move to canada where all parties are centrist!
Yeah I dont know if this is factual or not. I may agree that grandkid argument if it is focused on a family with 3-20m fortune maybe, as that seems to be the consensus view in wealth management land, but there arent as many 250m+ individuals who are blowing thru it like that. Also disagree on your wealth comment, there are dynasties with huge wealth over many generations, Zuckerberg is an outlier.
I also think the whole consumption/GDP argument is so bogus. I guarantee people do not benefit as much from someone buying a ferrari as they do from tax receipts which are spent on programs for the country. Nor are the majority of those people “job creators”, unless its the byproduct of the PE fund they invest in (which they invest in to make more money, not social benefit).
“If there was one thing the Revolutionary generation agreed on — and those guys who dress up like them at Tea Party conventions most definitely do not — it was the incompatibility of democracy and inherited wealth. With Thomas Jefferson taking the lead in the Virginia legislature in 1777, every Revolutionary state government abolished the laws of primogeniture and entail that had served to perpetuate the concentration of inherited property. Jefferson cited Adam Smith, the hero of free market capitalists everywhere, as the source of his conviction that (as Smith wrote, and Jefferson closely echoed in his own words), “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.” 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.” The states left no doubt that in taking this step they were giving expression to a basic and widely shared philosophical belief that equality of citizenship was impossible in a nation where inequality of wealth remained the rule. North Carolina’s 1784 statute explained that by keeping large estates together for succeeding generations, the old system had served “only to raise the wealth and importance of particular families and individuals, giving them an unequal and undue influence in a republic” and promoting “contention and injustice.” Abolishing aristocratic forms of inheritance would by contrast “tend to promote that equality of property which is of the spirit and principle of a genuine republic.” Others wanted to go much further; Thomas Paine, like Smith and Jefferson, made much of the idea that landed property itself was an affront to the natural right of each generation to the usufruct of the earth, and proposed a “ground rent” — in fact an inheritance tax — on property at the time it is conveyed at death, with the money so collected to be distributed to all citizens at age 21, “as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property.” Even stalwart members of the latter-day Republican Party, the representatives of business and inherited wealth, often emphatically embraced these tenets of economic equality in a democracy. I’ve mentioned Herbert Hoover’s disdain for the "idle rich"and his strong support for breaking up large fortunes. Theodore Roosevelt, who was the first president to propose a steeply graduated tax on inheritances, was another: he declared that the transmission of large wealth to young men “does not do them any real service and is of great and genuine detriment to the community at large.’’ In her debate in Delaware yesterday, the Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell asserted that the estate tax is a "tenet of Marxism.” I’m not sure how much Marx she has read, but she might want to read the works of his fellow travelers Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Herbert Hoover, and Theodore Roosevelt before her next debate.”
Well, we could allow the government to take 100% of everyone’s wealth when they die and do away with most other taxes. Thinking that might have quite the effect on GDP. So much for that 100 million dollar plant being built.
The problem with this is that the U.S. government is making up the difference (at least in part) by issuing debt. If you find the idea of tax-free transfers to the living odious, then how bad is leaving a big bag of debt for future, as of yet unborn generations?
The inheritance to GDP argument is just not based on anything, I am sorry. I now a ton of people who inherited significant wealth and their GDP creation is so minimal its only overshadowed by their lack of contributing anything to the world other than money in investment funds to grow their money more. Also, so what if GDP was lower but there were more programs for people, or better roads, or better education funds available due to those taxes, would you trade a lower growth rate for better lifestyle for people? Pretty big mental leap to go from the current tax rates to a scenario the govt takes all of your wealth at death, lots of reality in between.
You know “a ton people.” Argument over. What was I thinking??
Look, I’m assuming you would agree a 100% death tax would be devastating to GDP. And you would agree society can function just fine with a 0%. You have to make assumptions and keep other things equal to even have a discussion. So, for every dollar over 0% that the death tax raises, a tax elsewhere is reduced, you are suggesting that a country as whole will be better off? At what % does the country start to be worse off?
Your argument about greater revenue and lower GDP is a different argument. If you can raise equal revenue, and have a higher GDP, why wouldn’t you want that? The revenue is what is needed for these programs you speak of, so you still get to redistribute.
Really? Who contributes more of their disposable income to charity? Republicans or democrats? Who wants parents to be able to get their kids out of poor schools and send them where they wish?
You’ll find that republicans don’t disagree with a lot of the said purposes of many federal government programs, they just what the feds out of it. The states and the people can take care of their own, thanks. Many people think Romney was a hypocrite because of what he did as governor and what he said during his presidential campaign. No hypocrisy at all. The role of the states and feds are very different in America. Our founders warned us that central government should be kept as small as possible. I have no problem with a state overseeing education, I just want the feds out of it.