Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzz
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.
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Yeah, I think a transfer tax that hits anywhere close to what "normal" people could obtain will be a political non-starter. I also think its unfair and penalizes hard workers like Sliver.
Also, Canada has a deemed disposition of all your assets on death. The very rich are generally rich based on appreciated assets (stocks, businesses, real estate) and the pay capital gains taxes on it when they die.
That is already better than the US system. In that system your heirs actually get to adjust the cost basis of all your assets to their value on death. And only the super rich pay estate taxes. So most US estates pay no capital gains tax nor any estate tax.