This post comes with no great proclamations, no sweeping statements that I feel the need to defend to the death. It just comes with an idea, one that I’m fairly sure everyone will hate, right or left.
In the United States, we have abysmal class mobility. The best way to figure out what class you’re going to be in is still to look at what class your parent is in. Those on the left say that this is because the “American Dream” is largely a myth, and there are systematic problems against poor people and people of color. The right say this is because people are lazy and lack personal responsibility. I’m going to go with the left on this one, just because I’ve seen study after study on how poverty basically cuts off your legs before you start the race for success. The solution to this tends to be from the left that we need to strengthen social safety nets to get people out of poverty. I agree, of course: there is a certain level of security that should be people’s by right.
But what about taking it from the top as well?
Right now, we have inheritance laws that give money, that someone did not work for, for whom the inheritor did nothing to earn, and allows him/her to coast through life as a lazy layabout. Why? The persons who actually earned the money are dead, so it’s not taking it from them. Let’s leave real property out of it and personal possessions- just finances and stocks. Why doesn’t all of that money get absorbed by the federal government (it says right on it that it is theirs anyway) and have the stocks reabsorbed by the company. Then we would have to worry less about lazy people getting a free ride.
This, of course, wouldn’t get rid of inequality at a basic level.* You would still have families that could afford better school materials, better tutors, and just have more hours to dedicate to their children. It also wouldn’t get rid of the system of nepotism and crony-ism that we swim in. But, it definitely would level the playing field just a little bit.
Thoughts?
*Anything short of a communistic group houses where all children were required to live and get the exact same things wouldn’t relieve inequality, but even socialist me is not willing to go there because: 1) different people need different things 2) a family unit of some sort is required for healthy development 3) too many people have too many different ideas as the right way to raise children.
The part about stocks getting reabsorbed by the companies particularly bothers me. It seems like it continues the shift of power in a corporation from the share holders to the managers. This trend has, in my opinion, already gone too far, and I would hate anything that makes it even worse.
For one thing, it would give the corporation a perverse incentive toward murder of its shareholders. It would also give one shareholder that same perverse incentive toward any other shareholder, since a fellow shareholder’s death automatically makes their own shares worth more (fewer outstanding shares, same basic value).
Not sure I’d do all, but definitely taxing the shit out of inherited money sounds good to me. It’ll never happen though. Maybe once the Vulcans and Romulans are reunified.
I am another common statistic in America and many parts of the world: I grew up upper middle class, but because as a woman, I was a victim of sexual, physical and verbal, I had to escape.
The act of escaping caused me to be cut off from the familial support so essential to remaining in the class I came from. No full bore high end college for me, no future, no career.
What’s worse, yet so typical for women and proven statistically, was that because of how this abuse effected by sense of purpose on earth, I clung to the first available selfish, dominant male I came across.
I did as instructed, produced children but again found myself having to extricate myself once again from abuse which was now effecting my children. I turned my back on the nuclear family and my root family had turned their backs on me.
And I became a social pariah, the scourge of public scorn that brought about an epic icon for guilt, shame, patriarchy and class fear. I was lower class, a woman and one who had no man or family to give me legitimacy.
I’ll die poor, I know I will, I have less social security coming to me because of the time I spent not working to heal my children. I have received no child support and my family and the social system have only a passing care; not enough to effect real change.
Worse, my ex husband was a member of the lower classes whose earnings have never meant much to anyone anyway, not enough to interest pursuit for the sake of my children.
Yes, class is everything, aside from gender and skin color. When all three or even just two are combined, your boat can easily be sunk like mine was.
No wonder then that so many women either cling to their dysfunctional families or their equally dysfunctional husbands when they have children. And no wonder that oftentimes those holding up the hierarchy of class and patriarchy are those who are most victimized by it.
My ex used to say to me when I refused to go along with some scheme or another or his or his bad behavior: “Shut up or I’ll pack you up and send you back to your Dad’s, you want that?”
It would shut me up pretty quickly.
I agree with the premise of the post, but I think the consequences would end up not being what you wanted (as is often the case with policy). What it would mean is that people who died “on schedule” (late in life and well insured) would spend on their money while alive, and the only people
Moreover, I can assure you it’s already relatively easy for rich people to avoid passing anything through probate by creating trusts, joint accounts, etc. If the tax rate for stuff passing through probate were 100%, there would be no doubt they would avoid it. For instance, a wealthy family who wanted to avoid your tax would simply title all of their possessions in the name of all living family members, rather than writing it in a will.
The one nice thing this would do though, is it would keep people from revealing secret dispositions of property only in their will. One wouldn’t find out only after hubby had died that he left everything to his mistress, because the state/feds would grab it instead.
Anyway, trusts & estates law is certainly a mess, inherited from even more patriarchal previous systems of real estate, real property, economics, and business law.
The best thing you can do is convince people, one at a time perhaps, that they should leave their money to worthier causes than their genetic offspring. DNA shouldn’t be the be all and end of what’s important to a 21st Century human. That said, no one wants to think that when they die, their children risks destitution, so it will probably never be an easy sell.
But I agree, other than how to implement palliative care to the concept of inherited wealth, there should not be any controversy that it should pass away.
Like single-payer health care, it’s a good idea for the U.S. (although I too have reservations of reabsorbing shares of stock into corporations). But unlike single-payer health care, which a majority of Americans support, this proposal is deeply unpopular. That’s because we are a nation of idiots, perhaps. But when pollsters ask, even poor people say they oppose “the death tax” because they want to be able to leave money to their children.
So very sorry for your experience Kate. That’s really the story of too many women… Why I hate sexism in a nutshell…
Anyway, the wealthy already get around the inheritance taxes now, merely by gifting their assets to their children while still alive. So I’m not sure how taxing the rich would work, except to raise their taxes. But you know, then they’d just set up residency and dual citizenship in a more tax favorable country.
Nobody needs to be a billionaire, especially when most likely they “earned” their wealth through massive exploitation. It’d have to be a government tax at the source, as a percentage of the factorie’s and corporation’s profits, but they’ve already figured out how to work that particular scam. Bleh, just raise their tax rate. Or nickle and dime them to death with a nice “fee” on every little thing pertaining to wealth accumulation — those would be much harder to evade. Every visit to an accountant or inheritance lawyer triggers a service tax, as a percentage of whatever it is that they doing. Now THAT would get their attention. lol
I’m with you on this one, and I sympathize with Kate. I’ve been there. My father was sexually abusive and he made sure I understood the deal early on – you give me access, let me do what I want – and you get your college education payed for, you get your fairy tale wedding, your house in the gated community, etc.
My older sister was willing to sell herself and her soul to him – so “Daddy” gave her all of those things – after she earned them on her back of course. I refused – and as soon as I turned 18 – he threw me out of the house. I know I’ll never be as well off as my parents or sister are, I’m sure I’ll be scrounging for money the rest of my life, I worked my way through school, it just pisses me off because I feel like, in a lot of ways, everything about the way this society is run, it’s still stacked in favor of rich, white, males.
The wealthiest people in this country, and the GOP, try and say that the poor, and what’s left of a middle class, are the “entitlement” people – that we expect everything to be handed to us, that we don’t want to have to work for anything. But if you ask me – I think it’s just the opposite. A classic example – our last president George W. Bush – Drinky McCokespoon.
This asshole hasn’t really accomplished anything in his life because his rich, white, daddy and his wealth have paved the way for him. He has never done a real days work in his life. Every school he got into, it wasn’t because he earned that spot, because he had the brains to be there, it was because his daddy pulled the strings or bought him that spot. And because of that, somebody else in this country, somebody who did work their ass off, who did earn that spot, they got screwed over and cast aside, simply because they weren’t born white and/or rich.
And that’s the story of Drinky’s life. That’s how he got into Yale, how he got his cushy jobs, how he got the presidency. I remember reading one of the last posts on here, talking about healthcare reform. There was a link to some business weekly, and one of the questions the site was asking it’s readers was – what if you don’t want to have your employees slacker kids on their insurance when the kids are twenty six.
When the truth is – rich, white men like Poppy Bush are those employers. People like us are the employees. If I worked for him in some capacity, he should have to give me health insurance and, if I had a kid that age, his company should have to cover my kid.
He can damn well afford to miss out on a few bucks. Why the hell should my money, in any way, shape or form, be going to him, why should he get to keep that money, just so that his drunken, coke head, slack ass of a son, can sit around by the pool all day not doing a bloody thing – while I’m busting my hump working eight hours a day, struggling to afford health care, praying to god they don’t cut my hours any more than they already have.
If you ask me – the French had the right idea – they got rid of their aristocracy – I would say the Russians had the right idea too – when they lined the Romanovs up against a wall – but they made the mistake of replacing them with the communists – which was just as self destructive – because the cronyism was just as bad under them. I’m all for laying a whopping tax on the inheritance money – like Jennifer said – only I’d want to find a way to close the loop holes that exist – like the one that allows people who are filthy rich to give away millions of dollars as “gifts” so they don’t have to pay taxes on it.
I’ve been a lonely supporter of confiscatory inheritance taxes for a good long time.
I think a top inheritance of a nice round million dollars (with an exemption for farms) sounds good.
Ellen-
I’m sorry to hear about your father being sexually abusive. I hope you and your sister get the help you need.
@ Bobby
The only problem with that is the law is biased so that it thinks that you really, really want to give your money to your family members. Say you give all your money to a church that you’ve been going to near all your life. You can have some second-cousin come out of the woodwork and go “The church had undue influence over her, she really, really wanted to give me that money, her family” and s/he’d win. (Real court case I learned about in class). So even convincing people one by one doesn’t work.
I fail to see how this particular measure would lead directly to the result you wish to see come to pass. In fact I can imagine several scenarios where this proposal could actually exacerbate the situation you claim to want to rectify.
On the one hand you correctly identify that some people on the right assert that the poor are lazy and lack responsibility and it is because of this that they remain poor. You also correctly note that this doesn’t account for the whole situation.
Unfortunately, your argument then loses steam when you resort to levying an identical claim against the wealthy when you state the following:
“for whom the inheritor did nothing to earn, and allows him/her to coast through life as a lazy layabout”
In other words, the individuals you correctly criticize seem overly preoccupied with the subset of poor people who are actually lazy when this is a false generalization. However, at the same time you seem preoccupied with the subset of the wealthy people who are actually lazy and hence make a false generalization of your own.
It would be far more accurate to recognize that there are lazy individuals amongst the poor and there are lazy individuals amongst the wealthy.
The goal here should ideally be to put resources into the hands of the most productive members of society wherever they happen to come from. If they are productive and come from a wealthy background they should continue to reap the benefits of that wealthy, if they are productive and come from a poor background they should have ample opportunities to upgrade their standard of living.
I fail to see how creating a system that by default would deprive the productive children of wealthy parents of an inheritance and offer that sum to the government or to a corporation improves anything.
Will the corporations redistribute this wealth to productive poor individuals?… or will those funds simply find its way back into the company and end up benefiting the surviving investors?
All this strategy will end up doing is having wealthy people gain an inheritance from other wealthy people as a benefit of their death as opposed to those persons children inheriting it.
If that money does not benefit the investors where does it go? Into the salary or benefits package of the CEO perhaps? I think you see where I am going here.
No matter how you slice it, all you would achieve is money flowing from one rich person to another rich person or corporate big wig.
Similar problems exist for simply letting the government absorb their existing savings. That money isn’t going to find its way into beneficial social programs so much as projects and local perks that will keep politicians in office.
All of that being said, I really feel like this suggestion is motivated more by your resentment and anger at the fact that somewhere some rich kid is getting a free ride and you seem more concerned with punishing those individuals than you are actually presenting something that will solve the problem you say you are interested in addressing.
I knew the “class resentment” argument was going to pop up somewhere. I’m surprised it took 10 comments, actually, but then again, we don’t have a very broad audience here.
*shrugs* Some wealthy are lazy, others aren’t. Some poor or lazy, others aren’t. That actually doesn’t effect my point at all, other than I was using the language that conservatives give to poor people to the wealthy. People who coast along on an inheritance are the only people for whom laziness is even an option.
I fail to see how striking inheritance would take money from a productive person, rich or poor. The point would be that the person who actually “earned” the money would be dead. They can’t reap the benefits of money if they were dead. The point is why give money who did not not earn it?
Projects and local perks do in fact benefit a community. But, some of this money would have to go into social programs just because that’s how taxes work. I’m not saying this would fix poverty forever, because aside from the things that I’ve already pointed out at the top, we have an abysmal social safety net that would have to be strengthened if we wanted to get rid of poverty. But that would take money, and that money would have to come from somewhere.
So, there’s the one-two of the approach- we break generational inheritance which leads to privileged statements like “You know, a million dollars is not a lot of money” and we have money to fund a social safety net for those in the lowest quarter. All without taking any money that someone “earned”.
It wouldn’t take lawyers and estate planners 10 minutes to devise a whole new set of documents and protocols that transferred everything a will would handle at the last second of life, making the transfer a “gift” rather than a bequest.
People with property want to decide who has it after they are dead. Eliminating wills, probate and inheritance wouldn’t accomplish much of anything except a huge new name game.