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The Greatest Wealth Transfer in History Is Here, with Familiar (Rich) Winners

nytimes.com

111–120 of 176 posts

Re: The Greatest Wealth Transfer in History Is Here, with Familiar (Rich) Winners

#111
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So don't save up $2 million for inheritance... No one is forcing you to do that. Not to mention the increased taxes will be paid back, at least to some extent, in enhanced services. Maybe your kids could get a free education and free healthcare instead of $1M each in inheritance. Or instead of increased services, we could tax other things less such as the income of living people. I'd much rather have dead people, who…

Encouraging people to frivolously spend on luxury instead of saving is a terrible idea.

Encouraging rich people to spend, and using that money to better support poor and working class people is a great idea.

Re: The Greatest Wealth Transfer in History Is Here, with Familiar (Rich) Winners

#112
post #103
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The step up applies only to assets in one's estate at death, not assets in trust. IIUC, the very wealthy have limited exposure to step up in basis because they use trusts. Everyone else doesn't want to owe taxes when selling a house at market value they, e.g., inherited from a recently deceased loved one. The policy is not insane. It's sufficiently popular that no politician touches it.

No it’s insane. Like any tax it could be made progressive, make the tax lower or nonexistent for smaller amounts of money. But stepping up the basis is insane and indefensible. It’s a heads I win tails you lose approach. Basically you’re saying oh we know there are capital gains here but they are not realized so it’s not time to tax them yet and then the person dies they say just kidding those capital gains never hap…

> It’s a heads I win tails you lose approach.

All capital gains taxes are heads-govt-wins. The step up is simply not applying that insanity, for once, at death. That is, it's marginally sane.

Re: The Greatest Wealth Transfer in History Is Here, with Familiar (Rich) Winners

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inheritors didn't earn it.

Neither did the government. Why shouldn’t the person who did earn it get to decide what happens to it? After all, they could choose to donate some to the government. No one does though, voluntarily, because we all know that money would get wasted.

If you'd like a modern tech view of government, think of it as a platform that creates the marketplace (aka an app store) where you pay a tax to do business.

Re: The Greatest Wealth Transfer in History Is Here, with Familiar (Rich) Winners

#114
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The government” isn’t a fixed entity. It is what people want to be funded. Wealthy Americans donate enormous amounts of money to entities that would be publicly funded in many other countries: universities, hospitals, concert halls… Everybody wants to give money to something where they get their name on a wall and the envy of their rich peers. Meanwhile projects that could be more beneficial to society but don’t hav…

Not sure what country you’re from, but here in the US tax money does not efficiently get to these projects “beneficial to society”

That’s something people can change by voting, even in America. The Roosevelt administration allocated tax money very differently from the Hoover administration, for example. Whether the New Deal was beneficial to society could be debated, but enough people believed in the change to keep voting for it.

Re: The Greatest Wealth Transfer in History Is Here, with Familiar (Rich) Winners

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the moment of death, capital gains tax on unrealized gains has not yet been incurred. The estate tax is one way to force those gains to be taxed (but not the only way, of course).

That sounds fair and reasonable when you're talking about stocks, but if you talk about a small family farm who's owners typically have very little capital other than the land, are you proposing that they sell the farm in order to keep it?

A $12 million family farm may be stretching the definition of 'small'.

Like it would be pretty amazing if that value was just due to land appreciation and had nothing to do with their management and investment decisions.

Re: The Greatest Wealth Transfer in History Is Here, with Familiar (Rich) Winners

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the moment of death, capital gains tax on unrealized gains has not yet been incurred. The estate tax is one way to force those gains to be taxed (but not the only way, of course).

That sounds fair and reasonable when you're talking about stocks, but if you talk about a small family farm who's owners typically have very little capital other than the land, are you proposing that they sell the farm in order to keep it?

All of the "small family farms" I'm aware of personally here in farm country are incorporated.

I think you need a better straw man.

Re: The Greatest Wealth Transfer in History Is Here, with Familiar (Rich) Winners

#117
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the silliest comments I’ve read on HN: it’s not fair to have successful parents that love you, therefore the government must step in and fix that.

They aren’t taxing love they’re taxing money. We always tax money when it transfers from one person or entity to another.

No we don’t. In fact we rarely tax intra-family money transfers. When I pay for my kids’ college, that’s not taxed. Buy then a car at 16 - untaxed.

Re: The Greatest Wealth Transfer in History Is Here, with Familiar (Rich) Winners

#118
post #39

If you taxed boomer-> millennial inheritances at just 25% you could completely eliminate the black-white wealth gap in the next couple of decades. There’s a reason that affluent white people are talking about DEI, and not raising our absurdly low inheritance taxes.

A 25% inheritance tax, i.e. lose everything your family worked for in just four generations. That's ignoring inflation. The logical conclusion of the idea that where you are born is just an "accident", and you have no legitimate link to your ancestors.

> lose everything your family worked for

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...

Re: The Greatest Wealth Transfer in History Is Here, with Familiar (Rich) Winners

#119
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it’s insane. Like any tax it could be made progressive, make the tax lower or nonexistent for smaller amounts of money. But stepping up the basis is insane and indefensible. It’s a heads I win tails you lose approach. Basically you’re saying oh we know there are capital gains here but they are not realized so it’s not time to tax them yet and then the person dies they say just kidding those capital gains never hap…

My simple tax take is that we should just treat all income streams as regular income, and have whatever progressive rate on that income and be done with it. By creating different classifications of income and constantly tweaking the rules, we setup entire tax evasion industries catering to those who have control of their income streams & money to pay advisors. There's lots of BS that estate tax exemptions are there t…

I agree. But if we had a simple system people would be able to tell whether or not they get adequate value for their money. Obtuse and opaque are a defense against fair or just, take your pick.
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