Quote:
Originally Posted by Sliver
Yeah, I see that. Maybe this is one of those turning points where a person starts to get more conservative as they get older? I'm 45. I like to save. My kids are teenagers. We've been saving for their university since they were born. Maybe a guy starts to want to "protect what's his" to the detriment of others.
If you look at buying financial security for your offspring as just another thing you can choose to buy...like maybe the guy next door buys a $60k boat and an $80k F-150 to pull it with, but I just float around on a pool noodle and drive my older truck and use the same capital to invest in my kids' future. How are you going to get a guy like me on board with wanting to claw my money back on my death?
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Ya, it absolutely goes against human behaviour. I don't really know how you make it work in a manner that your efforts gets trasfered to your children without also causing unfairness to perpetuate. We clearly aren't that interested in it, otherwise we'd be transferring wealth globaly to bring everyone to the same standard, and I'm not sure anyone is ready to do that. But at the same time society will fail if wealth concentrates to much, and generational wealth transfer occurs unfettered.
If someone like you chooses to work harder, you may spend less time with your family, so in a way you have traded those dollars earned for less family time, and your children suffered a bit. Someone else chooses to work less, and have more family time. I agree that then you should be able to pass that on, because your children payed for it, in a way. It's not really a straight forward thing you can quantify.
I don't know a solution, but one day we are going to need one. Perhaps just taxing obscene wealth transfers, so anything over a certain threshold is taxed higher. You never get full equality, but then you can pass some benefits down. And scooter transfers are charged full inheritance tax.