Moniker wrote:I gave that a read, but I'm having trouble understanding the rationale behind the proposed increase of estate taxes being a good thing. He categorizes the current upper class as being either inheritors or earners. But, as I see it, if a rich man has earned his money his entire life, why shouldn't he be able pass it on to his progeny, unimpeded? It's literally his money, after all, Why shouldn't he get to decide where it goes after he dies?
I'm not pushing a position, merely asking for comment.
This is a pretty reasonable question of course. So a person born into wealth obviously shouldn't be punished for that fact. (I also do view the requests of the dead seriously, but when it comes to how volatile wealth and capital are administered, the needs of the living obviously outweigh the wishes of the deceased - who actually don't have any wishes that we can know about, because they are dead. It's worth noting that people don't always faithfully observe the preferences of the dead; wills get challenged and even public boons, like a 1600s "in eternity" park grant, sometimes get trashed.)
But the same is true for people in poverty, whether they were born that way or find themselves the victim of fate. And evidence suggests that these people have a harder time bouncing back than do people born into wealth.
Wealth translates into more wealth in different ways. Even if there aren't tangible assets to follow through generations, you can look at connections and education. In fact, a Georgetown University professor has done just that to try and track wealth transfer from slaves down to today, with the idea of giving that money back to black people (somehow). Dr. Richard America was one of the panelists on
this show, if you wanted an idea (I also wrote a little post in the comments section, taking issue with this idea of a wealth transfer).
Estate taxes can be a way of ensuring that wealth doesn't spawn generations of idle wealth. We know not all these people are Bruce Waynes (actually, that's just a guess). I don't particularly want to cause anybody to lose the family home, but with a lot of this wealth - especially at the top - that's not actually going to happen anyway. An estate tax does not necessarily mean gutting the fortune entirely. It can mean, however, that those fortunes don't snowball over the generations without the heirs having to really earn it.
So I wrote the post not thinking about estate taxes - I think the capital / earned wages distinction, on the other hand is very compelling and probably represents lower-hanging fruit, at least when setting out the moral case for erasing that distinction.
Some random links from Pando:
A bunch of arguments for limiting CEO pay, and also some more facts:
US corporations make more after-tax profits today than they have in the entire 85 years the Commerce Department has been keeping track. Meanwhile, employer-paid compensation, which includes wages and employer contributions to health care and social security, are at their lowest level since 1948. Making matters worse, the compensation CEOs receive has skyrocketed to 273 times what an average worker makes. By comparison, in the 1960s, the CEO-to-employee pay ratio was only 20:1.
It's hard to have a first-class nation, with strong infrastructure and people able to create new infrastructure and contributions
on their own, when they don't make according to their inputs - especially when they're barely subsisting, as so many do.
Us on the "left" (or really the old-fashioned center, or even right-of-center!) are being expected to be all nice and helpful about this, while guys who game the system in pay-to-play schemes thumb their nose at scandal - like that engulfing
Chris Christie and MA candidate Charlie Baker, who may both well believe themselves to be out of the reach of the law. And, as I said elsewhere, I think Donald Sterling's comments weren't just odious because of the race angle, but because of the economic paternalism. He was apparently quite open about screwing people over just because he wanted to. It's his money, right?
So, where do we need to be - do things need to be absolutely democratic (in the sense that anybody can participate), or should we be happy if they are just a little bit democratic? Final
Pando link:
That doesn’t sound like democratizing education, if only the affluent can afford the version that works.
I would be careful to say this is not democratizing it. Any alternative path is actually much more expensive. We managed to lower the cost by a factor of ten. Going to the extreme and saying it has to be absolutely free might be a bit premature. I care about making education work. Everything else being equal, I would love to do this at the lowest possible price point. Where we’ve converged is right. You don’t need a college degree anymore. I would be careful with the conclusion that this is the end of democratization. We still have the free model for students. It just doesn’t work as well — it’s just a fact.
What a company like Udacity offers is a way to push things out to people. It's not a perfect solution, but it's something. Likewise, there aren't terribly many people who seriously believe that we should go full tilt towards central planning and the like - I would argue that will be wasteful. Perhaps it wouldn't be as wasteful as Red October, but when we can get much closer to where we want to be with relatively (both conceptually and politically) minor policy tweaks and fixes, I'd go that way for greater likelihood of success and also less disruption to people everywhere. At least for me, this isn't at all about class rivalries; it's a problem to be delineated and solved in an essentially technocratic, by-the-numbers fashion, and guided by good principles - standards for policy that stand up to dispassionate scrutiny. This one, for instance, would be "we aren't looking to screw people over just 'cuz they're rich or lucky."
