I said I do not support it, but that’s mostly because I’m not sure how it could be fairly administered. We already do that with property taxes and it seems to work (not perfectly, but what is?)
But again: it’s an asset that the bank will give you money for and you can live high. Then you can die, your heirs can pay off the loan, inherit the rest at a new tax basis, and repeat the process, ad infinitum. That seems desperately unfair to the rest of the world who have to, you know, work for a paycheck.
Easier fix would be to simply inherit the original tax basis. That also neatly eliminates the “family farm” and “family business” issue.
I don’t see the “ad infinitum” working here. Even at low interest rates, borrowing year after year after year will eventually cost more than the taxes that would have been due.
Jeff Bezos, no long the wealthiest man on the planet, is worth $250,000,000,000. If he lives the high life spending an average of $50 million dollar per year for the rest of his life, (he is 61) he has perhaps 25-30 years left.
I think if you do the math, subtract the interest paid, you’ll find that the sum to be transferred is nearly the same as he started with, and the next generation (assuming there is one) could easily do the same thing, over and over again, perhaps not infinitely but through enough generations that there is no meaningful difference.
(San Walton’s grand-children and great grandchildren are now among the richest people in the country, and that’s after 50 years and multiple divisions of the estate - with possibly without even using the “borrow and show no income” trick.)
We have created a system of landed and untouchable wealth, not different from that of the Dukes and Lords of centuries ago.
Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last seventy years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging.
The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times. At the apex of the new order are two classes―a reborn clerical elite, the clerisy, which dominates the upper part of the professional ranks, universities, media and culture, and a new aristocracy led by tech oligarchs with unprecedented wealth and growing control of information. These two classes correspond to the old French First and Second Estates.
Below these two classes lies what was once called the Third Estate. This includes the yeomanry, which is made up largely of small businesspeople, minor property owners, skilled workers and private-sector oriented professionals. Ascendant for much of modern history, this class is in decline while those below them, the new Serfs, grow in numbers―a vast, expanding property-less population.
I suppose it helps to overstate things to sell a book. “Inexorably”? “Feudal”? Social and economical mobility has declined, but still 50% end up better off than their parents.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t that mean 50% end up worse off than their parents?
And how does that compare with earlier eras in the 20th century?
Oh, look!
Children in the early-to-mid 20th century (born 1940s) were significantly better off financially than their parents, with 90% earning more, but this trend sharply reversed later in the century, with only about 50% of those born in the 1980s achieving this upward mobility, marking a fading American Dream due to economic shifts and inequality, especially impacting the middle class and industrial regions.
Well, this would apply to anyone at any level of wealth. If you only spend only 0.02%* of your wealth each year for your remaining decades, then you will end up with all your starting wealth (and most likely way more).
A total of 74% of Forbes 400 members scored a 1 (signifying lifetime giving of less than 1%) or a 2 (less than 5%). That’s the highest percentage since Forbes began scoring giving in 2020, as net worths have shot up amid soaring stock markets but charitable donations have not kept pace.
Isn’t that kinda Goofy’s point, though, or at least one of them? It is an example of such tremendous wealth that can afford to spend “0.02% of your wealth each year” to live in extreme luxury and where that spending would be exponentially more than the average person’s spending, and still be able to increase wealth, if only in interest alone.
No. The point was that the wealthy can borrow against their assets for decades and decades (even over multiple generations) so they never have to sell assets and thus pay capital gains taxes on those sales. Instead they can simply die and have the basis of all those assets stepped up to the value at the time of death.
Yup, I suppose, too. I don’t necessarily have a problem with either of our points, but when Goofy’s illustration specifically said “spend” the logical interpretation to me was spend from the total pool, not borrow against it. The result is very similar: even if Bezos spent $50 M/yr out of $250 B (0.02% of the total) and the corpus earned interest of 3-5%, he would accumulate and pass on a lot more than $250B after 25 or 30 years.