One of the reasons Bill Gate's father among others were campaigning against the repeal of "Estate Taxes" was so we wouldn't have a permanent wealthy class in the US. (Estate taxes are taxes paid on your money when you pass away before being distributed. Right now I think its only on holdings over 5million)
The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest (2016)
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Re: The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest (2016)
#22I don't understand this. Assuming no inbreeding, families that consistently have 2 kids roughly double in size every generation - a 600-year-old family would have 1 billion unique descendants by now. Of course, there is a ton of inbreeding - in the technical sense - but I still have a hard time imagining a 600 year continuous family line that isn't a pretty arbitrary chart of certain descendants here and there. It's…
It's a patrilineal family line. Women of the family who bear children are (in most of Europe) considered to have exited the family. In addition, sufficiently distant relationships often break off into cadet branches and stuff like that. There's a whole field behind this weird stuff.
Re: The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest (2016)
#23> taxpayers data in 1427 was digitized and made available online Wow, the Renaissance was really ahead of its time.
If I recall correctly, they invented banking. So, yes, they were really advanced.
Re: The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest (2016)
#24Fun anecdote, but to say something universal about families and wealth over centuries, you'd have to look at vastly more regions.
Especially since this is talked about for being so different from the norm.
Re: The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest (2016)
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your maths seems off. 600 years at, say, 25 years per generation, yields 24 generations. Doubling each generation gives a factor of 2^24, or around 16 million, not 1 billion.
He just got to 2^30, which implies a 20 year generation time. Pretty reasonable before the 20th century.
This is hilarious. Given that the world's population is 7 billion today, we started with (7x2) people 600 years ago? LOL. Doesn't check out.
Re: The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest (2016)
#26One of the reasons Bill Gate's father among others were campaigning against the repeal of "Estate Taxes" was so we wouldn't have a permanent wealthy class in the US. (Estate taxes are taxes paid on your money when you pass away before being distributed. Right now I think its only on holdings over 5million) http://billmoyers.com/2015/04/18/william-gates-sr/
Unfortunately, several states have repealed the common law rule against perpetuities entirely. Long story short, rich people can create trusts that pay a steady income to their families for as long as they want, including for hundreds of years.
There's no estate tax upon your death because the assets were already transferred. The assets aren't taxed on transfer, either, but only as they're paid out to the beneficiaries. The effect is as if the original grantor (your great Uncle Gates) was immortal, giving out stipends to his descendants.
You don't hear about this much because the state laws are only a few decades old, but the repercussions play out over generations. It'll become a thing in another 100 years or so when people finally realize what's happening.
Before this the trick was to use corporations. Maybe nominally non-profit, but mostly existing to employ the descendants. That's still a good idea depending on what you're trying to accomplish. Like with trusts you create it in a state with friendly legislation.
It sucks that conservatives are so hell-bent on repealing the estate tax, but it's really not a battle worth fighting over. The war was lost long ago. What nominal revenue the estate tax brings in has been shrinking for awhile, and it'll eventually shrink to nothing.
At this point people are just fighting for an idea. And I literally mean _just_ an idea. Retaining the estate tax won't stop anything, and it might give people a false sense of comfort. Maybe better to let it get repealed, then hope that in a few generations there's enough backlash to not only restore the estate tax, but to foreclose the alternatives as well.
Re: The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest (2016)
#27I don't understand this. Assuming no inbreeding, families that consistently have 2 kids roughly double in size every generation - a 600-year-old family would have 1 billion unique descendants by now. Of course, there is a ton of inbreeding - in the technical sense - but I still have a hard time imagining a 600 year continuous family line that isn't a pretty arbitrary chart of certain descendants here and there. It's…
That's not correct; once you reach out a few generations the branch becomes a web as distant relations marry. That's the only way it can work if you think about it.
Re: The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest (2016)
#28One of the reasons Bill Gate's father among others were campaigning against the repeal of "Estate Taxes" was so we wouldn't have a permanent wealthy class in the US. (Estate taxes are taxes paid on your money when you pass away before being distributed. Right now I think its only on holdings over 5million) http://billmoyers.com/2015/04/18/william-gates-sr/
Unfortunately, several states have repealed the common law rule against perpetuities entirely. Long story short, rich people can create trusts that pay a steady income to their families for as long as they want, including for hundreds of years. There's no estate tax upon your death because the assets were already transferred. The assets aren't taxed on transfer, either, but only as they're paid out to the beneficiari…
Do you have a reference on the states and trusts which need to be foreclosed?
Re: The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest (2016)
#29This makes for a great headline but fails to capture the entire picture which would include "families that are rich now and weren't before" and "families that were rich then and aren't now". Another interesting statistic has families that were made wealthy in a short time by circumstance (lottery, judgement, IPO, etc) and are still rich, vs those that lost all of their wealth again. It seems the best way to have the…
The Freakonomics podcast covered this. There have been small-scale examples of this sort of thing but the best researched one is from Georgia.
The tl;dr is that the government stole a huge chunk of land from the Cherokee but the white public got really angry because the politicians intended to split up the land among themselves. To avoid being tossed out of office they setup a lottery and distributed the land randomly. About 20% of Georgia's white population at the time got a huge chunk of land for free. The study shows it didn't have much of an impact on families over the long-term.
The paper: http://www.nber.org/papers/w19348
The podcast: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/would-a-big-bucket-of-cash-r...
Re: The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest (2016)
#30One of the reasons Bill Gate's father among others were campaigning against the repeal of "Estate Taxes" was so we wouldn't have a permanent wealthy class in the US. (Estate taxes are taxes paid on your money when you pass away before being distributed. Right now I think its only on holdings over 5million) http://billmoyers.com/2015/04/18/william-gates-sr/
Unfortunately, several states have repealed the common law rule against perpetuities entirely. Long story short, rich people can create trusts that pay a steady income to their families for as long as they want, including for hundreds of years. There's no estate tax upon your death because the assets were already transferred. The assets aren't taxed on transfer, either, but only as they're paid out to the beneficiari…
It's become painful to me to listen to most well-intentioned folks debate estate taxes and wealth inequality. So few understand what wahern describes above. The whole debate is a school of red herrings. European tax law is even more of a mess than the US in this regard; even if some practices are eventually ended here, whether in 10 years or 100 years, I have little doubt they will continue on unabated most everywhere else.