5 ms·

For societal equality 2 things I feel are really important are; 1) Death taxes. This limits dynastic wealth if a decent % is being taken back every generation.

For societal equality 2 things I feel are really important are; 1) Death taxes. This limits dynastic wealth if a decent % is being taken back every generation. And it creates a desire to make opportunity for the next generation as it's not so easy to buy this directly. Assuming there is a minimum threshold so people don't lose their family home this should be looked at quite positively. You can see it as deferred taxation obligations. Given the government needs a certain amount, I'd much prefer to pay less tax while living if I can delay contributions til death. 2) Keeping necessities in life equal access. As soon as the elite can segregate them-self from public systems like schools and hospitals the desire to fund and ensure top service levels across these for the masses goes down. If people making the funding decisions have to use the same schools, hospitals, pensions, roads etc as the rest of the masses they will ensure these are funded and functioning well.

intrasight 11y ago
Which is why many suggest that congress should only get health care through medicare.
applecore 11y ago
Does one need an estate tax if there's either a tax on wealth or a land value tax?
- bsbechtel 11y ago
  Keep in mind any tax on non-liquid assets that don't generate a lot of free cash flow can be very burdensome to those who control those assets. I believe this is why some states have moved away from death taxes....family farms were being sold off to pay taxes from the previous generation.
  - jellicle 11y ago
    There's no evidence of this ever happening. http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/3/the-estate-tax-isnt-destroying-family-farms.html http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/3/the-estate-tax-...
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    That was the "Joe the Plumber"/"CRA caused the financial crisis" story of estate tax.
  - hackuser 11y ago
    An interesting but related point about the power of propaganda: The family farms story is a myth created (or maybe first given authority) by Bill Beach at the Heritage Foundation around 1996. It was part his plan for the rhetoric and talking points of an assault on the estate tax.[1] repeal proponents are still unable to produce a single, verifiable example of a farm or business closing due to the burden of estate tax payments. [as of 2013] It's amazing to think that one person can sit down in a room and plan terminology and a story like that, and here we are almost 20 years later and people blithely repeat it. It's a bit scary too. The term "death tax" was part of the same planning, though I'm not sure it was Beach's idea. I highly recommend the article below, which will change how you look at politics forever: [1] http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19132 http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19132
    - ams6110 11y ago
      "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor"
    - bsbechtel 11y ago
      Actually I had never heard of this made as a political argument before. It was a family friend who had to sell off assets in a small manufacturing business to pay off the taxes due on their inheritance. So yeah, it happens.
NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
> Assuming there is a minimum threshold so people don't lose their family home t There is no minimum that satisfies both. What's a house cost in San Francisco or LA now anyway? If we set it too low, people lose family homes/farms, if we set it too high the rabble-rousers bitch. There's no value that works. >Keeping necessities in life equal access. As soon as the elite can segregate them-self from public systems like schools I'm not sacrificing my children to the public school system. Sorry.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  >If we set it too low, people lose family homes/farms, if we set it too high the rabble-rousers bitch. There's no value that works. People losing their family homes and farms is what should happen in a meritocratic society. Intergenerational wealth transfer is by its very nature antithetical to meritocracy. The irony is that for many people laboring under a very unmeritocratic society, its the one sliver of wealth which keeps them afloat. Ergo they can be relied upon to support it.
- hackuser 11y ago
  Sorry to see you voted down. Though I disagree, I think these are good points. > If we set it too low, people lose family homes/farms, if we set it too high the rabble-rousers bitch. There's no value that works. This is true of any issue; there always are people who disagree and yet somehow, through the democratic political process, we've been passing laws and establishing policy for 239 years. Politics sucks, but it works. Even Iran and the U.S. can find agreement. > I'm not sacrificing my children to the public school system. Sorry. I think this is perfectly valid and responsible. It's not your kids fault, and they'll be better prepared to contribute to the community with a better education. But if you don't support the public schools otherwise (e.g., through taxes and political support), you are sacrificing your kids. They will live in a world filled with many more uneducated, unskilled people. These people will vote, will be your kids co-workers (or employees or talent pool), will be your kids' customers, etc. And your kids will lose the benefits of all the brilliant things that could have been done with all that wasted talent.
FlannelPancake 11y ago
> As soon as the elite can segregate them-self from public systems like schools and hospitals Ehh, I mostly agree with your first point but I think it's kind of a pipe dream to think it could be otherwise. Go visit a public school in a place like Greenwich, CT and then go visit a public school in the Bronx. Both technically public schools, but students have a clear advantage in one vs the other. Sure, Bill Gates's kids aren't going to public school probably even in Greenwich. Still, let's not pretend that the elite only go to private schools, or that they wouldn't congregate in wealthy areas to make public schools essentially private. Inequalities will always exist as long as people can use their assets to gain advantages for themselves/their families, and trying to force it otherwise against an unwilling populace is likely to just exacerbate the problem in other ways (see: Suburban flight).
- michaelchisari 11y ago
  Both technically public schools, but students have a clear advantage in one vs the other. Funding schools through property taxes is an easy explanation for that one. There are other factors, of course, but are there any other industrialized nations where public funding of education is directly tied to parental wealth?
  - streptomycin 11y ago
    The US is not homogeneous in that regard. Many states give more funding to schools in poor towns than rich towns, for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district in NJ. Hasn't had a measurable impact on reducing the performance disparity. The real problems, whatever they are, run much deeper than local funding of schools. Focusing on funding is a red herring.
    - tsotha 11y ago
      Yep. The problem with schools in poor neighborhoods is the students have to go to school with other poor kids. If money were the problem, D.C. public schools would be the best in the nation.
yummyfajitas 11y ago
The problem with (1) is that a large amount of inheritance taxes are taxes on illiquid assets. So if you inherit a $10M business, the only way to pay your tax bill is to liquidate the business. Needless to say, it's bad for society if a business is shut down simply due to the death of a founder. The way to resolve (1) is if the IRS allows you to pay taxes on in-kind receipts with in-kind payments. I.e., if you get a business that the IRS claims is worth $10M, and you owe $3M in taxes on it, you can pay your tax bill by handing the IRS $3M worth of shares. (This would also fix a major problem that startup employees have, namely that if they quit their job, they need to exercise options and incur a huge tax bill. But they can't actually sell the shares to get money to pay the taxes. Not a problem if they can give the IRS some of their shares.)
- obrero 11y ago
  > inheritance taxes are taxes on illiquid assets This is why estate planning exists. Any business that actually plans for estate taxes will not have this problem at all.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    They have different problems - diverting investments into liquid cash to pay off tax bills. This is also bad, since rather than expanding a productive business cash is diverted to creating unnecessary liquidity. There is also no "estate planning" for various other incidents of the same issue, e.g. employees cashing out stock options.
    - hackuser 11y ago
      > diverting investments into liquid cash to pay off tax bills. This is also bad, since rather than expanding a productive business cash is diverted to creating unnecessary liquidity. By that argument, all taxation is bad because it diverts funds from other purposes. Yet we must pay for government services. Government is an investment; what you are saying, in effect, is that there are opportunity costs to the investment - a truth of every investment.
obrero 11y ago
> As soon as the elite can segregate them-self from public systems like schools and hospitals And military front lines. The US has had a system to allow the children of the rich to avoid the military during wars since World War II - the student 2-S draft deferment to the end of conscription altogether in the early 1970s. This goes back in US history - the US Civil War is where the phrase "rich man's war, poor man's fight" comes from.
- wtbob 11y ago
  > This goes back in US history - the US Civil War is where the phrase "rich man's war, poor man's fight" comes from. Rich Yankees, yes: a rich Northerner would pay a poor man to take his place in the draft. A rich Southerner would outfit his own regiment and lead it in defense of his home.
hackuser 11y ago
Interestingly, "death tax" was a term of propoganda created for the organized campaign against the estate tax. The story is told in the article below; it's worth a few bucks. It will change how you look at politics forever. Probably, like almost all Americans, you have no idea how carefully planned many of the political arguments everyone repeats [EDIT: as everyday conversation] are, and by just a few people: http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19132 http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19132
- Gustomaximus 11y ago
  Maybe to my point we should rebrand it as 'deferred tax obligations'. Could even even give people the option to pay (for easy example) 2% estate tax yearly while alive or 30% at death type deal. I bet most would happily take the 'deferred tax' option.
- jivardo_nucci 11y ago
  Surely you could provide a reference not behind a paywall?
IkmoIkmo 11y ago
On 1) there's been a ton of research on intergenerational social mobility, and it plays such a gigantic role that inheritance of capital has become inheritance of socioeconomic status and all that it entails. And it's becoming a bit insane. Anyway it's not a death tax and I think it makes sense not to use the term too much. You die, your don't get taxed, you're dead. If you had no heirs, there'd be no taxation to be done because well hey you're dead. The taxation comes from inheritance. Calling it a death tax feels like screwing over old, vulnerable and well, dead people. But inheritance of even $100 is this money you never worked for, that you somehow deserve to have because someone related by blood just died. And if it's $100k I don't care much. But above that, it's insane to just get all this money you never worked for. I mean we don't do that for anything else, do we? We don't say 'oh your father was from a powerful family, he just died so here's 1 ticket to the best private school, 1 ticket to have people build you a house, 1 ticket to have doctors treat you for the rest of your life for free, 1 ticket to get all these fancy jobs' etc. It'd be pure nepotism. Yet when instead of a ticket, it's a bag of a ridiculous amount of money (say a few million), that can buy the equivalent of all those tickets, it's completely fine. And talking about a tax on that, so that if you inherit $100k you keep it all, but if you inherit $2m you only keep $500k (yeah, pretty aggressive), makes total sense to me. I mean that $500k is still a mind boggling advantage over those without it, you're basically carefree and set up until you're past 30 without any financial issues and any education you want, and the ability to take measured risks. I guess to some extent it's a self-reproducing issue. In an unequal society, if I had $10m, I'd want my kid to have it. In an equal society, I'd want my kid to have $50k and do his very best. Like here in the Netherlands I couldn't care less if my kid didn't inherit a whole bunch of money, university is essentially free, as is healthcare, subsidies exist for housing, if you work hard and have parents to guide you, money isn't a top factor (although it plays a role, always). But in the states I'd be really concerned for my kids as a poor parent, and if I happened to be rich and about to die, I'd really want to leave them wealth because it plays such a big role in social mobility.
- wtbob 11y ago
  > But above that, it's insane to just get all this money you never worked for. It's the person who worked hard for it who's giving it to his heirs. It's not money falling from the sky.
Frozenlock 11y ago
About inheritance taxes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJwUaVDIPXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJwUaVDIPXg
shahryc 11y ago
Although I understand your argument, I don’t think” 1) death taxes “ or 2) “Keeping necessities in life equal access” actually help maintain societal equality re: death taxes, Tyler Cowen writes in the WSJ, “ It isn't clear that the estate tax raises much, if any, revenue. The very rich engage in tax-avoidance strategies. The apparent revenue raised is often offset by a lower intake from income and capital gains taxes. Furthermore, it has been estimated that the costs of implementing tax-avoidance strategies are roughly equal to the (gross) revenue raise.” But, even if this premise is not true (that there’d a positive net difference in the revenue raised), that’s assuming that the rich will maintain the same level of spending before they die, which may not be the case if they will get taxed on it when they die. In other words, the rich would have a greater incentive to spend it while they are alive, which merely increases consumption inequality. re: Keeping necessities in life equal access. I agree on that point. But, I think it’s very difficult to achieve because of the complex factors that differentiate people in society. For example, in a given National Blue Ribbon School, there’s mix of people from different socioeconomic backgrounds that theoretically have equal access to educational resources the school provides. But, in practice, the educational resources that the school does not provide (at-home support, extended social networks, etc.) will be heavily correlated with a higher socioeconomic background.
- hackuser 11y ago
  > Tyler Cowen writes in the WSJ, “ It isn't clear that the estate tax raises much, if any, revenue. The very rich engage in tax-avoidance strategies. The apparent revenue raised is often offset by a lower intake from income and capital gains taxes. Furthermore, it has been estimated that the costs of implementing tax-avoidance strategies are roughly equal to the (gross) revenue raise.” Cowen is merely repeating the talking points of the propaganda campaign against the estate tax planned in the mid-90s: Yet in order to win over a specific audience to the issue, conservative discourse began to shift toward another frame,[1] as can be seen in important reports on the estate tax written by conservative analyst Bill Beach. Beach had been specifically brought to the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, thanks to funds raised by Alabama estate planner Harold Apolinsky, who formed the American Family Business Institute (AFBI) in 1992 to lobby against the estate tax. ... In a 1996 backgrounder ... [Beach] offered three main arguments for repeal: the estate tax is a diminishing source of revenue; it fails to achieve its purported goals of wealth redistribution; and the tax does more harm than good in lost productivity, lost jobs, and decreased revenue through other taxation.[2] As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Beach was also the source of the myth that small businesses and family farms were suffering from the tax, and the same campaign carefully developed the term 'death tax', which they credit with much of their success. Also, as mentioned elsewhere, the cited article will change forever how you read political commentary on any issue, as you realize that much of it, including by unwitting lay people, is parroting propaganda developed by special interests. > ... even if this premise is not true (that there’d a positive net difference in the revenue raised), that’s assuming that the rich will maintain the same level of spending before they die, which may not be the case if they will get taxed on it when they die. This seems very speculative. I've heard so many arguments with a similar argument: 'don't tax the wealthy or they will do X'. For example, the Reagan administration and others at the time argued that reducing taxes on the wealthy would increase their productive use of the funds, causing wealth to 'trickle down' to everyone else. As it turned out, cutting taxes on the wealthy (and thereby relatively increasing the burden on everyone else) made the wealthy wealthier (surprise!), and everyone else's income has been stagnent since then. The wealthy need to do their fair share and make the same sacrifice as everyone else; they are not a special case. ---- [1] "frame", as in a way to 'frame' an issue or debate [2] "Death and Taxes: Issue Framing and Conservative Coalition Maintenance" by Richard Meagher: https://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19132 https://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19132

intrasight 11y ago

Which is why many suggest that congress should only get health care through medicare.

applecore 11y ago

Does one need an estate tax if there's either a tax on wealth or a land value tax?

bsbechtel 11y ago
Keep in mind any tax on non-liquid assets that don't generate a lot of free cash flow can be very burdensome to those who control those assets. I believe this is why some states have moved away from death taxes....family farms were being sold off to pay taxes from the previous generation.
- jellicle 11y ago
  There's no evidence of this ever happening. http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/3/the-estate-tax-isnt-destroying-family-farms.html http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/3/the-estate-tax-...
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  That was the "Joe the Plumber"/"CRA caused the financial crisis" story of estate tax.
- hackuser 11y ago
  An interesting but related point about the power of propaganda: The family farms story is a myth created (or maybe first given authority) by Bill Beach at the Heritage Foundation around 1996. It was part his plan for the rhetoric and talking points of an assault on the estate tax.[1] repeal proponents are still unable to produce a single, verifiable example of a farm or business closing due to the burden of estate tax payments. [as of 2013] It's amazing to think that one person can sit down in a room and plan terminology and a story like that, and here we are almost 20 years later and people blithely repeat it. It's a bit scary too. The term "death tax" was part of the same planning, though I'm not sure it was Beach's idea. I highly recommend the article below, which will change how you look at politics forever: [1] http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19132 http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19132
  - ams6110 11y ago
    "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor"
  - bsbechtel 11y ago
    Actually I had never heard of this made as a political argument before. It was a family friend who had to sell off assets in a small manufacturing business to pay off the taxes due on their inheritance. So yeah, it happens.

NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago

> Assuming there is a minimum threshold so people don't lose their family home t There is no minimum that satisfies both. What's a house cost in San Francisco or LA now anyway? If we set it too low, people lose family homes/farms, if we set it too high the rabble-rousers bitch. There's no value that works. >Keeping necessities in life equal access. As soon as the elite can segregate them-self from public systems like schools I'm not sacrificing my children to the public school system. Sorry.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
crdoconnor 11y ago
>If we set it too low, people lose family homes/farms, if we set it too high the rabble-rousers bitch. There's no value that works. People losing their family homes and farms is what should happen in a meritocratic society. Intergenerational wealth transfer is by its very nature antithetical to meritocracy. The irony is that for many people laboring under a very unmeritocratic society, its the one sliver of wealth which keeps them afloat. Ergo they can be relied upon to support it.
hackuser 11y ago
Sorry to see you voted down. Though I disagree, I think these are good points. > If we set it too low, people lose family homes/farms, if we set it too high the rabble-rousers bitch. There's no value that works. This is true of any issue; there always are people who disagree and yet somehow, through the democratic political process, we've been passing laws and establishing policy for 239 years. Politics sucks, but it works. Even Iran and the U.S. can find agreement. > I'm not sacrificing my children to the public school system. Sorry. I think this is perfectly valid and responsible. It's not your kids fault, and they'll be better prepared to contribute to the community with a better education. But if you don't support the public schools otherwise (e.g., through taxes and political support), you are sacrificing your kids. They will live in a world filled with many more uneducated, unskilled people. These people will vote, will be your kids co-workers (or employees or talent pool), will be your kids' customers, etc. And your kids will lose the benefits of all the brilliant things that could have been done with all that wasted talent.

FlannelPancake 11y ago

> As soon as the elite can segregate them-self from public systems like schools and hospitals Ehh, I mostly agree with your first point but I think it's kind of a pipe dream to think it could be otherwise. Go visit a public school in a place like Greenwich, CT and then go visit a public school in the Bronx. Both technically public schools, but students have a clear advantage in one vs the other. Sure, Bill Gates's kids aren't going to public school probably even in Greenwich. Still, let's not pretend that the elite only go to private schools, or that they wouldn't congregate in wealthy areas to make public schools essentially private. Inequalities will always exist as long as people can use their assets to gain advantages for themselves/their families, and trying to force it otherwise against an unwilling populace is likely to just exacerbate the problem in other ways (see: Suburban flight).

michaelchisari 11y ago
Both technically public schools, but students have a clear advantage in one vs the other. Funding schools through property taxes is an easy explanation for that one. There are other factors, of course, but are there any other industrialized nations where public funding of education is directly tied to parental wealth?
- streptomycin 11y ago
  The US is not homogeneous in that regard. Many states give more funding to schools in poor towns than rich towns, for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district in NJ. Hasn't had a measurable impact on reducing the performance disparity. The real problems, whatever they are, run much deeper than local funding of schools. Focusing on funding is a red herring.
  - tsotha 11y ago
    Yep. The problem with schools in poor neighborhoods is the students have to go to school with other poor kids. If money were the problem, D.C. public schools would be the best in the nation.

yummyfajitas 11y ago

The problem with (1) is that a large amount of inheritance taxes are taxes on illiquid assets. So if you inherit a $10M business, the only way to pay your tax bill is to liquidate the business. Needless to say, it's bad for society if a business is shut down simply due to the death of a founder. The way to resolve (1) is if the IRS allows you to pay taxes on in-kind receipts with in-kind payments. I.e., if you get a business that the IRS claims is worth $10M, and you owe $3M in taxes on it, you can pay your tax bill by handing the IRS $3M worth of shares. (This would also fix a major problem that startup employees have, namely that if they quit their job, they need to exercise options and incur a huge tax bill. But they can't actually sell the shares to get money to pay the taxes. Not a problem if they can give the IRS some of their shares.)

obrero 11y ago
> inheritance taxes are taxes on illiquid assets This is why estate planning exists. Any business that actually plans for estate taxes will not have this problem at all.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  They have different problems - diverting investments into liquid cash to pay off tax bills. This is also bad, since rather than expanding a productive business cash is diverted to creating unnecessary liquidity. There is also no "estate planning" for various other incidents of the same issue, e.g. employees cashing out stock options.
  - hackuser 11y ago
    > diverting investments into liquid cash to pay off tax bills. This is also bad, since rather than expanding a productive business cash is diverted to creating unnecessary liquidity. By that argument, all taxation is bad because it diverts funds from other purposes. Yet we must pay for government services. Government is an investment; what you are saying, in effect, is that there are opportunity costs to the investment - a truth of every investment.

obrero 11y ago

> As soon as the elite can segregate them-self from public systems like schools and hospitals And military front lines. The US has had a system to allow the children of the rich to avoid the military during wars since World War II - the student 2-S draft deferment to the end of conscription altogether in the early 1970s. This goes back in US history - the US Civil War is where the phrase "rich man's war, poor man's fight" comes from.

wtbob 11y ago
> This goes back in US history - the US Civil War is where the phrase "rich man's war, poor man's fight" comes from. Rich Yankees, yes: a rich Northerner would pay a poor man to take his place in the draft. A rich Southerner would outfit his own regiment and lead it in defense of his home.

hackuser 11y ago

Interestingly, "death tax" was a term of propoganda created for the organized campaign against the estate tax. The story is told in the article below; it's worth a few bucks. It will change how you look at politics forever. Probably, like almost all Americans, you have no idea how carefully planned many of the political arguments everyone repeats [EDIT: as everyday conversation] are, and by just a few people: http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19132 http://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19132

Gustomaximus 11y ago
Maybe to my point we should rebrand it as 'deferred tax obligations'. Could even even give people the option to pay (for easy example) 2% estate tax yearly while alive or 30% at death type deal. I bet most would happily take the 'deferred tax' option.
jivardo_nucci 11y ago
Surely you could provide a reference not behind a paywall?

IkmoIkmo 11y ago

On 1) there's been a ton of research on intergenerational social mobility, and it plays such a gigantic role that inheritance of capital has become inheritance of socioeconomic status and all that it entails. And it's becoming a bit insane. Anyway it's not a death tax and I think it makes sense not to use the term too much. You die, your don't get taxed, you're dead. If you had no heirs, there'd be no taxation to be done because well hey you're dead. The taxation comes from inheritance. Calling it a death tax feels like screwing over old, vulnerable and well, dead people. But inheritance of even $100 is this money you never worked for, that you somehow deserve to have because someone related by blood just died. And if it's $100k I don't care much. But above that, it's insane to just get all this money you never worked for. I mean we don't do that for anything else, do we? We don't say 'oh your father was from a powerful family, he just died so here's 1 ticket to the best private school, 1 ticket to have people build you a house, 1 ticket to have doctors treat you for the rest of your life for free, 1 ticket to get all these fancy jobs' etc. It'd be pure nepotism. Yet when instead of a ticket, it's a bag of a ridiculous amount of money (say a few million), that can buy the equivalent of all those tickets, it's completely fine. And talking about a tax on that, so that if you inherit $100k you keep it all, but if you inherit $2m you only keep $500k (yeah, pretty aggressive), makes total sense to me. I mean that $500k is still a mind boggling advantage over those without it, you're basically carefree and set up until you're past 30 without any financial issues and any education you want, and the ability to take measured risks. I guess to some extent it's a self-reproducing issue. In an unequal society, if I had $10m, I'd want my kid to have it. In an equal society, I'd want my kid to have $50k and do his very best. Like here in the Netherlands I couldn't care less if my kid didn't inherit a whole bunch of money, university is essentially free, as is healthcare, subsidies exist for housing, if you work hard and have parents to guide you, money isn't a top factor (although it plays a role, always). But in the states I'd be really concerned for my kids as a poor parent, and if I happened to be rich and about to die, I'd really want to leave them wealth because it plays such a big role in social mobility.

wtbob 11y ago
> But above that, it's insane to just get all this money you never worked for. It's the person who worked hard for it who's giving it to his heirs. It's not money falling from the sky.

Frozenlock 11y ago

About inheritance taxes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJwUaVDIPXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJwUaVDIPXg

shahryc 11y ago

Although I understand your argument, I don’t think” 1) death taxes “ or 2) “Keeping necessities in life equal access” actually help maintain societal equality re: death taxes, Tyler Cowen writes in the WSJ, “ It isn't clear that the estate tax raises much, if any, revenue. The very rich engage in tax-avoidance strategies. The apparent revenue raised is often offset by a lower intake from income and capital gains taxes. Furthermore, it has been estimated that the costs of implementing tax-avoidance strategies are roughly equal to the (gross) revenue raise.” But, even if this premise is not true (that there’d a positive net difference in the revenue raised), that’s assuming that the rich will maintain the same level of spending before they die, which may not be the case if they will get taxed on it when they die. In other words, the rich would have a greater incentive to spend it while they are alive, which merely increases consumption inequality. re: Keeping necessities in life equal access. I agree on that point. But, I think it’s very difficult to achieve because of the complex factors that differentiate people in society. For example, in a given National Blue Ribbon School, there’s mix of people from different socioeconomic backgrounds that theoretically have equal access to educational resources the school provides. But, in practice, the educational resources that the school does not provide (at-home support, extended social networks, etc.) will be heavily correlated with a higher socioeconomic background.

hackuser 11y ago
> Tyler Cowen writes in the WSJ, “ It isn't clear that the estate tax raises much, if any, revenue. The very rich engage in tax-avoidance strategies. The apparent revenue raised is often offset by a lower intake from income and capital gains taxes. Furthermore, it has been estimated that the costs of implementing tax-avoidance strategies are roughly equal to the (gross) revenue raise.” Cowen is merely repeating the talking points of the propaganda campaign against the estate tax planned in the mid-90s: Yet in order to win over a specific audience to the issue, conservative discourse began to shift toward another frame,[1] as can be seen in important reports on the estate tax written by conservative analyst Bill Beach. Beach had been specifically brought to the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, thanks to funds raised by Alabama estate planner Harold Apolinsky, who formed the American Family Business Institute (AFBI) in 1992 to lobby against the estate tax. ... In a 1996 backgrounder ... [Beach] offered three main arguments for repeal: the estate tax is a diminishing source of revenue; it fails to achieve its purported goals of wealth redistribution; and the tax does more harm than good in lost productivity, lost jobs, and decreased revenue through other taxation.[2] As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Beach was also the source of the myth that small businesses and family farms were suffering from the tax, and the same campaign carefully developed the term 'death tax', which they credit with much of their success. Also, as mentioned elsewhere, the cited article will change forever how you read political commentary on any issue, as you realize that much of it, including by unwitting lay people, is parroting propaganda developed by special interests. > ... even if this premise is not true (that there’d a positive net difference in the revenue raised), that’s assuming that the rich will maintain the same level of spending before they die, which may not be the case if they will get taxed on it when they die. This seems very speculative. I've heard so many arguments with a similar argument: 'don't tax the wealthy or they will do X'. For example, the Reagan administration and others at the time argued that reducing taxes on the wealthy would increase their productive use of the funds, causing wealth to 'trickle down' to everyone else. As it turned out, cutting taxes on the wealthy (and thereby relatively increasing the burden on everyone else) made the wealthy wealthier (surprise!), and everyone else's income has been stagnent since then. The wealthy need to do their fair share and make the same sacrifice as everyone else; they are not a special case. ---- [1] "frame", as in a way to 'frame' an issue or debate [2] "Death and Taxes: Issue Framing and Conservative Coalition Maintenance" by Richard Meagher: https://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19132 https://www.psqonline.org/article.cfm?IDArticle=19132