Firstly anyone with a brain is gonna conveniently go broke before they die if you try and pull something like that.
Second I'm struggling to find words for just how fundamentally wrong, unethical and dystopian the assumptions that underlie your comment are. I and a hell of a lot of people don't want to live in a society where assuming malice is the default like that.
Just the wealthy. Estate taxes have (in the USA) applied only to large estates.
> on the premise that they probably wronged society
Some wealth is inherited now, but large gains (extracted from the market) are generally the result of exploitation.
> anyone with a brain is gonna conveniently go broke before they die
That's already happening, they call it The Giving Project.
Oops, too late.
I do not understand this sentiment one bit. To think that we should implement equality by pulling people down to the mean is, frankly, insane. That does nothing to help anyone - its a stance based solely on anger and jealousy. Your policy would literally decrease the average quality of life.
Would you be happy if everyone was destitute? At what point do you realize that actual quality of life matters more than perfect equality?
We achieve equality by bringing people up, not tearing them down. If you think we need more tax money to accomplish that goal, I would argue that we have much more of a budgeting problem than a tax income problem, but I understand the sentiment. But to think that the appropriate tax vehicle is to explicitly destroy lives is not an American ideal.
"It can be tough to prosecute some crimes, so let's just punish everyone without due process!"
What kind of bizarre sadism is that?
The people who lived out their days without going broke lose because their property rights are being violated. Their property and their dollars that they have already paid taxes on should be theirs to give away as they see fit.
Children aren't even entitled to their parents money in adulthood. Parents have to choose to give it to them either explicitly or by omission.
If you are against children being punished because of the economics of their parents, then surely you are in support for a strong social safety network for children (universal subsidized/free childcare, including meals, and healthcare), yes?
Which requires taxation or other funding sources.
Which means we must ponder things like: how much of Sam Walton's $100 million inheritance did his children need in order to not be punished by a higher inheritance tax? $5 million each?
The people who will be screwed are the middle class people who's only (if any) windfall in life is inheriting part of their parents house and using that to pay off their own mortgage or send their kids to college or whatever (and who's kids will likely inherit a share of the house and continue the cycle).
Because we can certainly reduce the number of complex workarounds - which were deliberately introduced to allow the rich to have those workarounds. We can increase the taxation rate for the highest tax bracket, like the 90% it once was. And we can increase the estate tax.
The current federal estate tax has an exemption of $5 million. Just how many middle class families do you think would be unable to send their kids to college if the estate tax rate after the first $5 million was increased? For that matter, how many middle class families would be unable to send their kids to college of the exemption were lowered to $2 million? Because $2 million seems like a lot to me.
Poorer people will receive no windfall in life. Since you want people to have windfall ... how do you want to support poor people? How should the children of the poor go to college or whatever?
Because otherwise what you write sounds like a standard wedge argument - get the middle class to fear for losing what little they have, in order so the rich benefit even more, while the poor get left out.
Higher pay via stronger union rights (repeal Taft-Hartley now!), universal college education. These help give your desired economic windfall for the middle class and my desired windfall for the less well off.
The rich and the children of the rich will still be rich.
It punishes those who would have had the assets otherwise. Especially when the stated reason is to punish them.
It's only punishment if you think there is a natural right to control the disposition of property after death. Otherwise, it's just a argument as to why a purely optional benefit not grounded in rights should not be extended by the state.
Not extending a benefit to which there is no entitlement is not inherently a punishment.
Countries that seize this much property don’t do too well economically.
If the children of the mom and pop shop die, and the children are preschool aged, with no other inheritors or people designated to handle the estate, then what?
Effectively no one says that "every generation must completely pull themselves up from zero".
Do you seriously think the children of working/labor class families, living in rental housing, and with no capital, completely pull themselves up from zero?
Since they don't, neither do the children you hypothesis. So what's the point of your argument other than to tug at our heartstrings about those orphans?
Oh, and if the mom and pop shop is bankrupt, or has little capital, and there isn't family or close friends able and willing to take care of the kids, then who will?
Oh, right, "some state system." So if you are so concerned about these children, perhaps we need better orphanages and better support for the foster system.
Now, how do we fund those improvements?
For the record, I don’t think the state taking away most (or all) of a person's estate after they’ve died is a punishment at all.
That is wrong by a factor of ~100. 0.2% of estates in 2017 paid an estate tax. [0]
[0] - https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/ten-facts-you-shou...
https://ballotpedia.org/Net_worth_of_United_States_Senators_...
(That was for 2011; it's a reasonably safe bet that as a group they're no poorer now.)
It was political will that created the loopholes in the first place. Getting rid of them unfortunately requires more political will than creating them did. This probably has something to do with loss-aversion.