I meant I would have to vote for a theoretical democratic candidate almost no matter how far left they went, but I wouldn't vote for someone who would implement a 100% estate tax.

Ah, sorry. Who reads dvaut posts? (jk)

People would just get around a 100% estste tax anyway. I'd just treat inheritance as ordinary income. No $10M exemption.

Where i live the two parties most opposed to the estate tax are the far left and the far right. Funny that they have found common ground.

Which far left is opposed to the estate tax?

The former communist party, now composed mostly of socialists but also a few communists and some other people from what i understand, and they will likely get 1-2 ppl into parliament the next election, they had none. They want to give away parts of a huge fund the nation owns (1 TUSD) to poor countries and wants to change the capitalist system in a drastic way but i think they still accept some private sector. There is another far left party to the right of these guys that is slightly bigger and then the moderate left next to those again. So they are certainly far left, but the leader just said today on TV that he has agreements with a far right wing leader that the estate tax is problematic and they want to do away with it. Funny world.

Where are you? Communist and socialist parties in some places are no true leftists it seems. In France the socialists (Macron was one before i believe) are like center left maybe, and the more leftist candidate was from the "Left Front" party.

The only way I see being so far left you are against estate taxes is if it's by default because you're against estates at all.

I don't know but apparently he's in a place where dumpsters and garbage cans don't exist nor do people throw away edible food.

I live in scandinavia. But the parties mentioned are very well defined, nothing fuzzy in where they stand basically, true socialists for sure. I had to double check this estate tax thing. The moderate left want estate tax, the far left party wants it more, and then this even further left wing party wants it to be decided locally and says they will be the first to remove it if some type of condition is fulfilled. They say that this particular tax can be very unsocial in some ways but in the cities/areas where it is already imposed they say they at least work to have it applied mostly to the richest people. But even then it seems like they dont love it.

It is true though that there are problems with the estate tax, some ppl lack liquid means to handle it and have to sell their expensive homes etc.

We got dumpsters here and whenever i have to throw something into them i make sure i only touch them with the tip of my finger and i hold my breath.

Yeah, I can see that about having to sell the family home, farm or business.

So we learned tiltedDonkey is expecting a large inheritance

Shut down all voting centers in aread with low population density, to "save money"

Develop a federal database of gun owners.

designate breitbart subscribers as a terrorist group.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G891A using Tapatalk

...they could tie Harvey relief to DREAMers.



https://twitter.com/AngelRafPadilla/...36393810690048



https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/905246085962194944

i don't think those words say what you think they say

Whoa. 6ix is some sort of wizard.

A "clean bill" is fairly well ill-defined.

"Single issue" is how he seems to mean it.

Is "I inherited a very expensive home that I have to liquidate in order to pay for my estate tax" REALLY an affront to leftist thinking?

So I don't see it. That is to say, I don't understand the left critique of a 100% estate tax due to the perils someone might inherit an expensive home that they have to sell to pay the tax on. It's like no ****, that's the point, that these assets don't just pass undisturbed in perpetuity. Insert business or family farm as well. The "but my family farm" is precisely the ham-handed defense of *removing* the estate tax that capitalists latch onto which usually withers with even slight scrutiny.

By the way, I'm not saying 100% estate taxes are necessarily great policy.

But: that TiltedDonkey and a bunch of Scandanavians are reporting their leftist parties are apprehensive about highly progressive inheritance taxes shows that I have the correct answer to the OP's question, that it's exactly the sort of spiteful and damaging policy designed pretty precisely to burden people who don't vote for them. I think the ultimate problem is actually that it casts the net too wide: as we see here, it burdens the people who vote for leftist parties too. The median, petite bourgeoisie soft leftist can support progressive income taxation on rich bozos but the summer cottage is too much, that's my birthright. Consider the ways this would infuriate people without leftist impulses.

It's also interesting that the psychology of taxing income seems defensible for more people but taxing your ancestors stuff on the event of their death seems like really cruel and beyond the pale when imo the principled justifications for taxing estates in a hugely progressive way is way more sound than the principled justifications for taxing income, which seems more of a second-best and practical compromise precisely because of how revolting estate taxes are to elites.

Is the idea behind sky high estate taxes simply to get money/goods back into the economic system? Because for an ideology that, roughly speaking, wants to do away with capitalism this sort of tax seems like it incentivizes the opposite.

No one said "very expensive". Having to pay taxes on an inherited home would force a lot of poor people out of the home they've been living in. In absolute numbers there could even be lots of elderly people themselves made homeless.

So, another reason for a huge tax code I guess. Make the tax payable over a long period or something.

I think count it exactly like income, allow it to spread out over like 10 years. Then if you have little other income and the house isn't expensive, you'll end up paying little or no tax on it.

100% tax doesn't sound fair to me. Treating it like income does.

Maybe? The assumption is that a huge, punitive estate tax goes to subsidize things like housing for people.

Again, I'm not suggesting it's a great policy. And I posted it in the spirit of "here's how to troll right-wingers."

BUT, still: "the family home" IS part the privilege of the wealthy. Even a modest one. I get that we want to carve out sympathetic space for cash poor, but a home is an asset and it's wealth accumulated in the past. No different than a pile of money.

Put differently:



What's the leftist explanation for this, and why isn't the situation more equitable? This isn't a jaunt into identity politics but just to make sure we don't lose sight of the fact that homes and property are vast stores of wealth, are an enormous part of a typical inheritance, and it's sort of hard to see how we could redistribute accumulated stores of wealth if we're wedded to yarns about all the homeless poors a very progressive inheritance tax would create. It seems no different than stories about the beleaguered family farmers. Sure, there's no doubt that might be an artifact of such a policy; you'll always find a few examples of something. And perhaps you could create an artful policy that tries to means test how we tax, or something.

But if the leftist project carves out inherited homes, just give the right-wing most of the argument. That's where privilege if fundamentally and mostly rooted: in property, in homes, in real estate, the most popular instrument people put a huge amount of their savings.

Inheriting a home gives someone a cheap way to get home equity credit to start a business or make other capital investments with at a low interest rate, etc. This is basic Piketty / 21st Century Capital stuff imo: so long as capital and real estate grow in value, secured credit is cheap, and labor value grows incredibly slowly in most sectors -- people who own homes are hitting a life jackpot, and owning that kind of asset gives someone a huge advantage over someone who doesn't, and the ability to perpetuate that advantage to future generations is one of the basic hallmarks of perpetual inequality.

As I said, this is a diversion from "let's troll the right" but I am wary when the left starts fretting about the cash poor being tossed out of their home in some environment with a huge inheritance tax. That *will* happen in some set of cases; given millions of instances of something, you'll always get exotic examples, just as the right seizes on the family farm to demand the current estate tax environment in the US is a huge burden on humble farmers. If you let those examples drive your values and lose sight of the bigger/meta picture then forget it, just give the right what they want from the start. No point in having the fight if we're going to quit if even a few sympathetic people are disadvantaged vis a vis the status quo.

The difference to me is if it's the home you've been living in that you inherit. If you haven't been living there, then it's exactly the same as inheriting cash. If it's your home, I think it should be treated differently. If your parents bought a house for $10k and it's "worth" $500k now, as long as you're just living there and not selling it or getting a loan against it I think it's fine to treat it as $10k. Not everything is a commodity and if you aren't treating your personal home (where you've been living) as one, then neither should society. Also, this should have limits imo. A modest home is perfectly social and natural even in societies without explicit property rights. A giant estate is anti-social and requires state intervention to be allowed to exist at all. Codifying this might not be simple and might require some arbitrary lines be drawn, but that's the way life is. Something necessitating fuzzy rules isn't a reason to adopt inferior well defined rules.

I propose either tax based on your parent's original home purchase price and then you can be taxed on the profit if/when you sell, or like I said, treat it as income, spread it out over 10 years or so. In theory I think I like the first option best now. Borrowing against the equity in the house would also trigger taxes (on the amount you borrow).

I think a business, including a farm, is different.

Excuse me folks, i made an error interpreting. Just forget my latest posts here.

!!

not going to say more about it.

(And yea probably all left wing parties are big fans of the estate tax)