6 ms·

Luckily, there are massively diminishing returns to money's effect on educational outcomes and overall happiness, so a dollar taxed from the rich is worth much

by cm2012 8y ago

Luckily, there are massively diminishing returns to money's effect on educational outcomes and overall happiness, so a dollar taxed from the rich is worth much less to them than to the poor it is given to.

drb91 8y ago
That’s probably more due to the fact that the value of an education is less necessary for the wealthy to succeed. Why bother trying when you can be president with a gentleman’s c?
jacobolus 8y ago
Not just educational outcomes. More money has massively diminishing returns to happiness, health, fitness, longevity, creative output, ... The biggest constraint is often individual people’s time/attention; additional money is only slightly (if at all) helpful for the already rich. But a little bit of money goes a long way to help people who are not eating well, don’t have a place to live, need to work 3 stressful part-time jobs to make ends meet, ... Massive inheritances (dropping someone tens of millions of dollars or more) are one of the greatest problems in our society. The top marginal tax rate for inheritances should be 90%+, and we should be cracking down hard on all the sneaky ways people hide gajillions of dollars for their descendants. Maybe with an exception for small family farms, since presenting farmer sob stories is one of the biggest ways billionaires have figured out to market their intergenerational hoarding.
- Spooky23 8y ago
  Nah. Rich farmers deserve little sympathy. The traditional farm evokes by pictures on milk cartons and politicians has been dead since the 80s. Pick a number around the 80th percentile of 401k balance at age 70 and tax it at 50%, then go up to 95%. The kickback to this modern gilded age is going to be brutal.
- jesssse 8y ago
  I do not see inheritance as a problem. My motivation for accumulating wealth is largely driven by a desire to provide for my future family members. Inheritance tax is theft.
  - jwatte 8y ago
    Not paying taxes is theft from the society that lets you accumulate and keep wealth.
    - taneq 8y ago
      And personal property is theft too, eh comrade?
    - mlazos 8y ago
      I don’t think anyone is saying avoid taxes entirely. I honestly don’t see why money should be taxed twice. Take income tax, fine, but if I decide to save money for my descendants then let me be. On its face it’s literally just a gift.
      - TheCoelacanth 8y ago
        The "double taxation" argument is nonsense. There are many taxes that apply to the same money multiple times. I have to pay income tax on the money when I get it, sales tax when I use it to buy something with it and then property tax on the thing that I bought. (Also, gifts and inheritances are taxed identically).
    - jakelazaroff 8y ago
      Not sure why the parent is being downvoted; it's just as mypopically black and white as the GP. Wealth accumulation is inarguably a two-way street, where a well-functioning society with dependable economic infrastructure enables people to accumulate wealth and contribute to the economy which further develops that infrastructure.
    - conanbatt 8y ago
      And when you are taxed for services you dont use, or are used against you, what is your recourse?
  - mrep 8y ago
    Money is generally taxed anytime it changes hands so an inheritance tax seems fine to me. Although, a 90% one would be ridiculous. Also, if you are in the US, the estate tax is now $11.18 million per taxpayer (so 22 million for a couple) due to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. As a result, only approximately 2,000 people (or 0.0006% of the population) in the US are currently liable for estate tax [0] so you should be fine unless you already have fuck you money at which point it doesn't really matter because again, you have fuck you money. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_State...
- ageek123 8y ago
  Even if you taxed estates at 100% you wouldn't contribute any meaningful amount of money compared to total government revenue or expenditures. So let's be honest, it's about punishing wealthy people (and accepting all the downsides to society of doing that), not actually helping people.
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    The point is not the amount of revenue. The point is that having billion-dollar inheritances creates incredibly skewed political incentives which end up leading to significant harms. If they taxed the estates at a high marginal rate with no gaping loopholes, auctioned off all the assets thereby recovered by the government, and then just zeroed out the bits representing the dollars in the resulting accounts, that would be just fine with me. Ultra ultra wealthy people are not being “punished” by having their estates taxed at a steep top marginal rate. The great-great-grandchildren of industry titans do not have a preordained right to massive wealth at the whole society’s expense. Money is a social construct, and can and should be designed to work for all of us. In a functioning society with a growing (or even stagnant) economy, each generation should inherit a greater wealth of public infrastructure, capital, services, knowledge, ... than the previous one. Instead, in our society there is an incentive for public officials to transfer collective assets to individual aristocrats in corrupt deals, to underfund/destroy public institutions, to take out loans guaranteed by the state and pocket the money, etc., impoverishing the next generation. This amounts to basically theft/fraud against the polis.
  - verbify 8y ago
    Unless I've read the figures wrong, a 100% estate tax could provide around 1/6th of government expenditure in the UK. This would be a meaningful amount of money. Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/inheritance-tax-statistics-table-122-exemptions-and-reliefs https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/inheritance-tax-sta...
mcguire 8y ago
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5479093/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5479093/ Table 3 is interesting. "Almost half (50.7%) of the children with low IQ [0–79] came from families with income <Rs. 50,000/month [$675/mo]. On the other hand, 65.6% of children with high IQ [above 120] came from families with more than Rs. 50,000/month (P = 0.001)"
conanbatt 8y ago
The famous utilitarian argument. Beware, it is also much better to seize your phone and computer to provide food to a starving african child.

by cm2012 8y ago

drb91 8y ago

That’s probably more due to the fact that the value of an education is less necessary for the wealthy to succeed. Why bother trying when you can be president with a gentleman’s c?

jacobolus 8y ago

Not just educational outcomes. More money has massively diminishing returns to happiness, health, fitness, longevity, creative output, ... The biggest constraint is often individual people’s time/attention; additional money is only slightly (if at all) helpful for the already rich. But a little bit of money goes a long way to help people who are not eating well, don’t have a place to live, need to work 3 stressful part-time jobs to make ends meet, ... Massive inheritances (dropping someone tens of millions of dollars or more) are one of the greatest problems in our society. The top marginal tax rate for inheritances should be 90%+, and we should be cracking down hard on all the sneaky ways people hide gajillions of dollars for their descendants. Maybe with an exception for small family farms, since presenting farmer sob stories is one of the biggest ways billionaires have figured out to market their intergenerational hoarding.

Spooky23 8y ago
Nah. Rich farmers deserve little sympathy. The traditional farm evokes by pictures on milk cartons and politicians has been dead since the 80s. Pick a number around the 80th percentile of 401k balance at age 70 and tax it at 50%, then go up to 95%. The kickback to this modern gilded age is going to be brutal.
jesssse 8y ago
I do not see inheritance as a problem. My motivation for accumulating wealth is largely driven by a desire to provide for my future family members. Inheritance tax is theft.
- jwatte 8y ago
  Not paying taxes is theft from the society that lets you accumulate and keep wealth.
  - taneq 8y ago
    And personal property is theft too, eh comrade?
  - mlazos 8y ago
    I don’t think anyone is saying avoid taxes entirely. I honestly don’t see why money should be taxed twice. Take income tax, fine, but if I decide to save money for my descendants then let me be. On its face it’s literally just a gift.
    - TheCoelacanth 8y ago
      The "double taxation" argument is nonsense. There are many taxes that apply to the same money multiple times. I have to pay income tax on the money when I get it, sales tax when I use it to buy something with it and then property tax on the thing that I bought. (Also, gifts and inheritances are taxed identically).
  - jakelazaroff 8y ago
    Not sure why the parent is being downvoted; it's just as mypopically black and white as the GP. Wealth accumulation is inarguably a two-way street, where a well-functioning society with dependable economic infrastructure enables people to accumulate wealth and contribute to the economy which further develops that infrastructure.
  - conanbatt 8y ago
    And when you are taxed for services you dont use, or are used against you, what is your recourse?
- mrep 8y ago
  Money is generally taxed anytime it changes hands so an inheritance tax seems fine to me. Although, a 90% one would be ridiculous. Also, if you are in the US, the estate tax is now $11.18 million per taxpayer (so 22 million for a couple) due to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. As a result, only approximately 2,000 people (or 0.0006% of the population) in the US are currently liable for estate tax [0] so you should be fine unless you already have fuck you money at which point it doesn't really matter because again, you have fuck you money. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_tax_in_the_United_State...
ageek123 8y ago
Even if you taxed estates at 100% you wouldn't contribute any meaningful amount of money compared to total government revenue or expenditures. So let's be honest, it's about punishing wealthy people (and accepting all the downsides to society of doing that), not actually helping people.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  The point is not the amount of revenue. The point is that having billion-dollar inheritances creates incredibly skewed political incentives which end up leading to significant harms. If they taxed the estates at a high marginal rate with no gaping loopholes, auctioned off all the assets thereby recovered by the government, and then just zeroed out the bits representing the dollars in the resulting accounts, that would be just fine with me. Ultra ultra wealthy people are not being “punished” by having their estates taxed at a steep top marginal rate. The great-great-grandchildren of industry titans do not have a preordained right to massive wealth at the whole society’s expense. Money is a social construct, and can and should be designed to work for all of us. In a functioning society with a growing (or even stagnant) economy, each generation should inherit a greater wealth of public infrastructure, capital, services, knowledge, ... than the previous one. Instead, in our society there is an incentive for public officials to transfer collective assets to individual aristocrats in corrupt deals, to underfund/destroy public institutions, to take out loans guaranteed by the state and pocket the money, etc., impoverishing the next generation. This amounts to basically theft/fraud against the polis.
- verbify 8y ago
  Unless I've read the figures wrong, a 100% estate tax could provide around 1/6th of government expenditure in the UK. This would be a meaningful amount of money. Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/inheritance-tax-statistics-table-122-exemptions-and-reliefs https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/inheritance-tax-sta...

mcguire 8y ago

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5479093/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5479093/ Table 3 is interesting. "Almost half (50.7%) of the children with low IQ [0–79] came from families with income <Rs. 50,000/month [$675/mo]. On the other hand, 65.6% of children with high IQ [above 120] came from families with more than Rs. 50,000/month (P = 0.001)"

conanbatt 8y ago

The famous utilitarian argument. Beware, it is also much better to seize your phone and computer to provide food to a starving african child.