There's a difference between sharing your wealth and transferring your net worth without exchange for goods or services. It seems simple enough to me. As society, we want to have a system that encourages work and providing value added. So we shouldn't tax income from labor at a higher rate than income from having a rich grandpa die, because that transaction didn't involve any real activity other than a lawyer handling paperwork.
The satisfaction of helping the deserving Zuccatti Park crowd? Oh what, there is no satisfaction in that because they aren’t deserving and you’re dead. Nevermind.
So much of this is so wrong, very wrong. 1. The vast majority of millionares in America are self made 2. The estate tax is much higher than the tax on income 3. The estate's weath being taxed a second time. 4. Confiscating legally acquired wealth simply because you can is just ********ing.morally.wrong.
So long as we have a tax system that recognizes a family as an entity I can't consider wealth shared between them a transfer. This is the impassable barricade. Either you believe the individual is unit of quantity or the family is. So now you need to explain to me why the other 300 Million shitdicks in this country are more deserving of that wealth than the person's own family. And I don't accept 'fairness' as a legitimate reason. Plenty of taxes have already been paid on that wealth.
You get to share the first million tax free - which is enough for your kids to live on unless you raised complete assholes. Anything after that, you get to split evenly between your asshole kids and all the hard working people of the country you proudly call your home.
That's not generosity. You moved your goods on our roads, found buyers on our intertubes, used our police force for protection, etc.
#OccupyStupidity WTF? My taxes don't pay pay for roads, police, and defense initiatives that create an intertube? How come you get credit and I don't?
And paid taxes for the privilege the whole way along. Having said this, the death tax part of your plan isn't a deal breaker for me.
Death tax. Frank Luntz. Ultimately politics is bullshit, there isn't a single thing Frank and I have ever agreed upon, and anybody who agrees with me politically thinks Frank is The Devil Incarnate ... and Frank is a good friend of mine. By the way, when Frank talks about social issues ... that's definitely do as I say, not as I do. I was there when he was in college.
Look I talk tough but I am sentimental too. I want my boy to do well, who doesn't? Hell, my boy played youth soccer for a decade, anybody who had the chance cut backroom deals to advance their kid did. There is no morality in youth soccer, no such thing. So believe me I am accustomed to the notion of take care of your own, ******** your neighbor's kid up the ass. But ... I have my limits. I can't sign off on the one million. Undergraduate education is quite enough, thanks much. Take care of 'em until age 22, that is sufficient.
You gotta compartmentalize with Frank. He supports bad policies and as you say in a bad way. There's no getting around that.
Make the payroll tax (above the current limit) 1% instead of 6% - or lower the rate but remove the cap - and we're in business. Otherwise the SS plan would result in a huge tax increase for me.
Agreed, the combination of the 6% uncapped payroll tax + the rise in top marginal rates makes for a pretty steep increase on high incomes. It's the right direction in my view but I don't think we need to go that far, either the uncapped payroll tax or the increase in top marginal rates would be fine, but not both.
I see it like breaking up monopolies. I mean is not fair if I work hard make good decisions and crush my rivals to bankruptcy, then buy them all out and acquire a monopoly in my particular business, why should the government then force me to sell of parts od my business like they did the Telephone or the railroads? It would be like playing monopoly then when you are about to win your mom comes in and tells you to give the money and property back to your friends. To me inheritance tax and anti monopoly laws are about not allowing the accumulation of wealth in few hands.