inheritance taxes are just mafia theft, no matter how you rationalize it
According to many on this site. All taxation is theft. This desensitize me to this argument.
Over $70T of inherited wealth over next decade will widen inequality, economists
101–110 of 236 posts
Re: Over $70T of inherited wealth over next decade will widen inequality, economists
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the average house price in London was £70k. Now it's >£700k. It doesn't have to be this way. It shouldn't be this way (for a healthy society) 10x in 35 years is compounded rate of return of under 7%, which is not far off the average mortgage rate over that period of time. Add in some maintenance and that might even represent a loss in real terms over that period of time.
Houses shouldn't be investments. Wages aren't 10x in that same period. All the increasing house price has done is transfer wealth from the younger generation to the older generation.
Wages havent kept up with the cost of a bag of rice either, I wouldnt suggest that rice has transfered wealth from the young to the old.
The underlying problem for the UK is wages - workers make less in real terms and pensions paid to the older generation go up by the highest of all the rates.
Taxation is the transfer of wealth from the younger generation to the older generation - the older generation paid less in and are getting more out.
Re: Over $70T of inherited wealth over next decade will widen inequality, economists
#103Wealth inequality is not an intrinsic bad, and it's not even worth striving to reduce. The only thing that matters is the average (pick your average) standard of living.
There's no point paying a fortune to have all the people who created the most value leave your country just so you can reduce a pointless metric, especially when all it does is get the state more money to spend on itself rather than reduce your costs or increase what you get for your costs.
Re: Over $70T of inherited wealth over next decade will widen inequality, economists
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would not cite Piketty, Zucman or Saez who are the hardest fighters of the wealth inequality thesis as they usually mix political advocacy and have been criticized in their methodology and have been under a fair share of controversies. Btw I have grouped them because this is how they are usually treated, both by the fact they are all French economists but also on the fact they all push for the same inequality thesi…
So you ask not to cite someone only because they believe in what they discovered and suggest to take action based on that? Who has not been criticize in their methodology? Who do you expect to avoid any amount of "controversies" for such a political subject? Your comment seems to be pure ad hominem. Also, discarding authors because they're French is kinda stupid: historically, quick advances in a field most often sta…
I never said to discard them because they are French, but the political ideas they advance are the centric positions of French culture which for every problem the solution is more taxes, taxes on the rich etc
It would be like expecting American economists to be very libertarian, or Chinese economists very interventionists. The culture of their countries reflects their ideas.
NB: J'habite en France
Re: Over $70T of inherited wealth over next decade will widen inequality, economists
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would not cite Piketty, Zucman or Saez who are the hardest fighters of the wealth inequality thesis as they usually mix political advocacy and have been criticized in their methodology and have been under a fair share of controversies. Btw I have grouped them because this is how they are usually treated, both by the fact they are all French economists but also on the fact they all push for the same inequality thesi…
The entire concept of economics without politics is nonsensical. They are one and the same.
I completely agree, thus no article should say "economists" but libertarian economist, social-democratic economist etc
Because the politics precede the findings
Re: Over $70T of inherited wealth over next decade will widen inequality, economists
#106inheritance taxes are just mafia theft, no matter how you rationalize it
According to many on this site. All taxation is theft. This desensitize me to this argument.
According to many on this site. All taxation on their 500k salary and 3mil in stock is theft.
According to the same people. Passing $1mil to your children is immoral and should be banned.
I suspect they love expensive shiny things and hate their children.
Re: Over $70T of inherited wealth over next decade will widen inequality, economists
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counter-example: All the European, and world countries who have implemented the various inheritance, wealth taxes and heavy redistribution yet the inequality is still widening. Take France, Norway or Sweden as the ideal social democracies. Argentina (the end game of social democracy) pre-Milei had a huge array of taxes and regulations which lead to the state misusing that money to actually enrich a small elite of pol…
Unlike people, capital has no nation. It can just move effortlessly from France to Switzerland to the Cayman Islands. That's why single-country initiatives to e.g. tax wealth (or even tax extremely profitable companies) are doomed to failure: those assets are easy to transfer and hide; if the UK passes a progressive wealth tax, all those global billionaires will just sell their empty houses in London and buy empty ho…
Does all of this capital really do anything for a country if it's just being parked? Would we miss it?
Re: Over $70T of inherited wealth over next decade will widen inequality, economists
#108Why is this post buried, I wonder?
It's in the 263th position, alongside posts from 4 days ago, and keep rapidly going down. Really weird.
Re: Over $70T of inherited wealth over next decade will widen inequality, economists
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like a lottery for housing, with extra steps? Hypothetical scenario: we have 100 houses, and 200 young families looking for one. Your solution in effect is: let's give 100 houses to the 100 young people with an inheritance. That sounds arbitrary. Lack of housing is a disconnected problem from inheritance taxes.
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Eddington is a fictional community, with 2 people: Ed and Sue. Unfortunately, due to lack of housing, they only have 1 house. The decision is made to hand it to Sue, because Ed's _parents_ were alcoholics that drank their life away.
The decision is not necessarily wrong. But the reasoning to base someone's fortune on the merits of their parents is very arbitrary. Why not base it on their own merits or needs?
Re: Over $70T of inherited wealth over next decade will widen inequality, economists
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Capitalism creates inequality, but in a socialism/communism economy there would be either no money or no goods. Everyone would be equally poor, not just some.
Why would there be no money under socialism?
Money only works when there is a base level of trust that later, money accepted will have some similar utility.