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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 hones

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...

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...