[ForHackernews]

Wow, talk about black-and-white thinking.

Consider: There may be other alternatives that fall between the extremes of "My kids get all the free money I can give them!" and "The government should confiscate all possessions and give everyone a state-sponsored apartment."

[gambiting]

Yes, for me it's either no inheritance tax, or 100% inheritance tax. Anything in between doesn't make sense as it it completely arbitrary. Why 10%? Or 60%? Or 85%? If you support the notion that children should work for themselves, then don't let them inherit anything from their parents - in which case, the government has to provide at least a place to live in. If you don't support the notion of taxing inheritance(like I do) then you should support the idea of inheritance tax being 0. Again - no tax is being evaded here. A person who made that money/bought those things already paid the tax on them. The government got their share in this already.

[ForHackernews]

> Yes, for me it's either no inheritance tax, or 100% inheritance tax

Ok, well, I think that's a ludicrous position to take, and your views on this topic are unreasonable. All taxes are "completely arbitrary" in some sense. They're the result of compromises, political and economic pressures, and expressions of the values of a society.

I agree with the parent comment that estates in excess of some amount (maybe one or two million dollars, inflation-indexed) should be taxed at an extremely high rate to discourage the development of aristocratic dynasties.

[gnaritas]

> Yes, for me it's either no inheritance tax, or 100% inheritance tax.

Then you need to mature your point of view because the world isn't so absurdly simple and black and white.

No thinking person can look at this country (U.S.) today and say accumulated wealth isn't causing a whole host of problems. The wealth inequality in this country is bad and needs to be addressed. The rich are out of control.

[JoeAltmaier]

Yeah but taxes aren't why. Its the rigged financial markets that have swiftly vacuumed up all the money and put it into the hands of those that - guess what - handle money.

[gnaritas]

There is no one why, there's a host of things that allow wealth accumulation and they all need to be tackled, but inherited wealth produces dangerous people: aristocrats who have no idea what it means to work and no appreciation for those that do, and that cannot be ignored.

And without all that wealth accumulation, the financial markets wouldn't be rigged. They were rigged by the wealthy buying politicians to get the laws they like passed. The markets are a symptom of the problem, they aren't the problem itself; accumulated wealth is the problem.

[JoeAltmaier]

But the fix is to undo the damage to the markets. At bottom humans are always the problem; but that's not actionable.

[gnaritas]

Nope, that's just treating a symptom; they'd just immediately break the market again and that's putting aside the point that they own your politicians and simply wouldn't allow you to fix it. Until you deal with severe wealth accumulation, nothing else matters and yes it is actionable. The French lopped off a few heads, it worked.

[dragonwriter]

> Yes, for me it's either no inheritance tax, or 100% inheritance tax. Anything in between doesn't make sense as it it completely arbitrary.

The distinction between inheritances and other forms of income in tax treatment is at least as arbitrary. If we tax income in general, why should income from inheritances be treated specially?

[viraptor]

If it was taxed @ 100%, we'd soon see a country-wide jump in salaries to gardeners and house cleaners. Also, a sudden increase of family businesses...

[gnaritas]

None of those avoid taxes; the point of the tax isn't necessarily to collect the money, but to force the person who made it to spend it rather than accumulate it in a family fortune over generations.