Plus, the federal government spends most of its revenue on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, defense, and interest on the national debt. Not investment in the capital markets.
Regards,
Shodan
No.
Yes. Ideally that necessary level would be quite low.
I don’t follow you. I’m not suggesting he not pay taxes, I’m suggesting it’s a moral wrong to make him pay rates ‘that approach 100%’.
I probably did not do the book justice. The main point of the book was how rigid a class structure we have in the US.
As far as division of wealth, I found this WaPo article interesting.
Mapping wealth (net worth) by quintile it presents a survey that gave the ideal division as 32/22/21/13/11.
Our actual division is 90/8/2/0/-1
Looking at just the top quintile, that 90 breaks out as
Top 1% - 40
Next 4% - 27
Next 5% - 12
Last 10% - 11
the remaining 80% is
60-80 - 8
40-60 - 2
20-40 - 0
0-20 - -1
I’m not sure where the plutocrat line starts and the top 1% certainly does well - but the folks from 80-99 have five times the wealth as the bottom 80.
The bottom quintile averages negative net worth?
Yes I think it’s actually not until partway into the second quintile that you get above $0 net.
Eh poking around it seems people are pegging the percentile all over the place. I’m not sure if they’re measuring differently, incompletely, or what.
You made two separate arguments in that post.
and
Which is the part of your post that I quoted and is what I was responding to. Your argument here is that it’s Grandpa Hilton’s money and he can spend it however he wants. This argument has nothing to do with percentages.
So is it a moral wrong to place a tax on Grandpa Hilton’s money if the rate does not approach 100%? Would you have a problem if Grandpa Hilton’s gift to his granddaughter Paris was taxed as if it were regular income? Would you have a problem if Grandpa Hilton died and the inheritance Paris received was taxed as if it were regular income?
There may be some practical issues that should be addressed (e.g. when a son inherits his father’s farm and is cash-poor) that ought to be dealt with a bit more compassionately, but I don’t have a philosophical disagreement with any of those, no.
Forget inheritance tax, I say, and focus on any money moved off shore/out of the country. Tax THAT wealth at 50-75% and see if that doesn’t improve investment at home.
If you won’t address the cash moved to tax havens, you’re just spinning your wheels, tax wise, in my humble opinion.
I think the best path would be to mark to market at death, allow a generous exclusion of say $5 million and then tax the rest at progressively higher rates reaching 50% somewhere around $100 million.
There is a limit to how much of your estate you can shelter. At some point you just pay the tax because there aren’t enough rocks to hide the estate under.
Tax revenue allows us to issue less debt.
I’ve recanted and said 50%. So we cool now?
I certainly think that the repeal of the estate tax as contemplated by the recent tax deal is a bad idea.
We should leave Iraq alone and invade the Cayman Islands.
Sure. While I certainly have a general preference for lower tax rates over higher ones, I’m not philosophicaly-wedded to the elimination of the estate tax entirely. I don’t particularly mind if Jeff Bezos’ heirs will have to scrape by on a measly $50B.
What’s the justification for the exclusion? I don’t get to exclude the first five million dollars of my income.
I’m not going to waste the energy on the scroll-bar, but yes, I think some leftist up-thread did propose a 100% tax. Lucky for you! — You needn’t address a 20% tax or a 40% tax now, you can vent all your spleen against the strawman.
And many extremists on the right, including the people now in control of the U.S. Congress, propose that the estate tax be 0%. If the defense for eliminating the estate tax altogether is to be based on “0 is less than 100%”, maybe that’s why we can’t have good debates here at SDMB anymore.
@ Hurricane — can you pretend that not all centrists support 100% estate tax? If you can do that, perhaps us centrists can pretend that you don’t support the Ryan-Pence Theft with its 0% estate tax. Then progress can be made.
Reasonable compromise? 
An estate tax larger than Zero, but smaller than 100% At this point I’m afraid you’ll be booed down by both sides: by the right-wingers AND by the straw-men the right-wingers have invented.
Where the Farnabyists lose their grip is in failing to see humans as part of human society. “You didn’t make that” — Sam Walton didn’t build his stores on a desert island; he provided them to human society. The idea of redressing wealth and income inequality in human society didn’t begin with FDR or even Karl Marx. Have you heard of Hammurabi the Great, King of Old Babylon who lived 3800 years ago? (I’m not addressing this to Farnaby himself, who surely thinks the early civilizations set back the cause of, well, civilization; that we’d have colonized Mars by now if not for the government thefts at gun-point in ancient Egypt and ancient Babylon — I’m addressing the rest of you right-wingers.)
Payday loans? Credit cards?
I’ve always favored what I see as the simplest solution. Stop taxing different sources of money at different rates. Income, capital gains, inheritances, gifts, whatever. Just figure out how much money you received last year and then apply a basic set of rates to it.
I don’t see why $400,000 in income should be taxed at 33%, $400,000 in capital gains should be taxed at 15%, and $400,000 from an inheritance should be taxed at zero percent.
And I definitely don’t see why $40,000 in income should be taxed at 25%, $400,000 in capital gains should be taxed at 15%, and $4,000,000 from an inheritance should be taxed at zero percent.
Skimming recent additions to the thread, it appears it is I who has lost his grip :o, and who should have wasted energy on the scroll-bar after all. The lions and the lambs are lying down together and a medium estate tax is being agreed to by all but the Farnabyists!
Should we take a vote? Has Susan Collins been informed?