Re:U.S. billionaires worry about the survival of the system ...
by lisper on Sunday April 21, 2019 @01:10PM
(#19713143)
> Inheritance tax is making it expensive to trasnfer a family-owned farm down the generations
That is why I added: "with an exemption for private businesses below a certain size that are both owned and administered by a single family".
> Bigger, wealthier families avoid the tax altogether by using legal methods
Yes, to make this work you'd have to eliminate those loopholes.
Inheritance tax is making it expensive to trasnfer a family-owned farm down the generations, and as a result they are sold to corporations instead. Bigger, wealthier families avoid the tax altogether by using legal methods, which makes the inheritance tax burden mostly fall on the poorer farmers. Removing ownership of land would do nothing to combat this. In fact, if farmers didn’t own their land, things would get worse, not better: they would have no incentive to use long-term (costlier) agricultural strategies, since they wouldn’t have any guarantee they’d benefit from it. Further, they’d be less likely to invest in long term equipment. Guess who would? Larger corporations. In other words, this proposal would exactly concentrate the wealth to big corporations, perhaps the opposite of your intention.