Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
That isn't the question. The question is how much you should benefit from the hard work of your father once you're an adult. And how much the prospects of a child of a single mother who works at Winner's should be narrowed because of the circumstances of his birth. Should one have a big leg-up buying his own house, while the other can never scrape together a down-payment?
Nope. We're rapidly moving towards a society where around 20 per cent of people will live in households with high incomes and good jobs, 30-40 per cent will have precarious jobs, mostly in the service industry, and the rest won't have the skills to find regular work.
You can be in that top 20 per cent yourself and still believe the social cohesion and general security and prosperity of your fellow-citizens affects your own happiness. When doctors and bankers are all the children and grandchildren of doctors and bankers, and grocery store clerks and drywallers are all the children and grandchildren of grocery store clerks and drywallers, social cohesion breaks down. When people end up going to school, marrying, and having children only with people of similar backgrounds, we develop a very narrow sense of 'we'. Civility goes down. Crime, fraud, and and the destruction of public property goes up. The rich, afraid to leave their affluent bubbles, come to live in enclaves just as restrictive as the poor.
The story of Estrada's father becomes less likely when only the children of the affluent are raised in the right neighbourhoods that have the good schools that secure the high-paying jobs that are the only way of getting ahead. And really, what's the difference between houses being priced out of the reach of average Canadians because of rich foreigners, and being priced out of the reach of average Canadians because of rich Canadians?
Edit: And just to be clear, I'm talking about using inheritance taxes to pay for our public health care, education, and pension systems, whose long-term viability is in doubt.
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You do raise very good points, and I have thought a lot about how part of the problem in the US has been the widening of classes and furthering erosion of the inability of class mobility.
If your last edit there was guaranteed and every last red cent went towards those types of programs or funds I'm sure people would be a lot more open to it, but call me skeptical the government would ensure that's the case.
What about a system that wasn't all or none. When you die you keep half your inheritance and the other half gets taxed towards those types of programs, or keep the tax in general to a relatively low level. I dunno. It is still double dipping though.