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Comment by chaz6 | Hacker News Reader

I believe inheritance should be completely abolished as it leads to hoarding of money that should be used in the economy, not stagnating in offshore accounts. I would also try to close any loopholes such as trusts and businesses that can be passed from parents to children.

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You want to ban parents from financially helping their children?

Never going to happen.

You can argue for caps and limits, but insisting that parents can’t transfer anything to their kids is nonsense.

Why is it nonsense? The wealthy and connected can already give their progeny undue access to opportunities via their social networks, and can afford the best education that money can buy. That's already way more of an advantage than the average citizen gets.

Besides, the whole point is to maximize equality of opportunity.

Equality of opportunity, as I understand it (and I think as it was historically broadly understood prior to Marxist socialism becoming mainstream in Mich of the West) meant each person got the same treatment before the law---i.e., no double standard for rich or special treatment for the poor. As soon as one decides what amount of wealth is too much to pass on, one has set an arbitrary limit---is passing $1000 to one's children too much? How is it principally different from $10,000, or from $10 million?

Or, if equal opportunity means equal rights to manage one's property as one sees fit, why set arbitrary restriction on property in monetary or financial form?

Equal treatment before the law is hardly equal opportunity. Think of that quote about how the law forbids the rich and poor equally from sleeping under bridges. The law does not correct for systemic inequalities.

> As soon as one decides what amount of wealth is too much to pass on, one has set an arbitrary limit---is passing $1000 to one's children too much? How is it principally different from $10,000, or from $10 million?

So set it at zero and be done, like what the person you were replying to was suggesting.

Here’s a counter study from the DOL

“ The main focus of the paper is to examine the effects of inheritances and other wealth transfers on overall wealth inequality. The results reported below are surprising, unexpected and even counter-intuitive. We find that wealth transfers actually act as a factor that decreases wealth inequality rather than increasing it. Though we do not have hard empirical evidence on whether inheritances inhibit or spur intergenerational wealth mobility, we infer that wealth transfers are likely to raise the degree of wealth mobility across the generations.”

https://www.bls.gov/osmr/research-papers/2011/pdf/ec110030.p...

Worth noting that this study is based on a survey where people self-report (by the inheritor) inheritance flows. In countries where this is tracked in parallel with actual estate data, most inherited wealth is not reported on these sorts of surveys.

It is also based on patching together different datasets from different authors.

Estimates using non-self reported data as well as homogenous (rather than pasted) series have found that about 60% of wealth in the US is inherited, likely 50% of that is inherited by the top 5% most affluent households, and that the effect is inequality enhancing. [0]

[0]: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/estateshort.pdf

Also all that hoarded unearned wealth can buy a lot of influence. Look around your city at who the civic leaders are and the agendas they are pushing with wealth that accrued just because great grandpa followed his manifest destiny and was in the right place at the right time to acquire tracts of natural resources or now-valuable urban real estate.

Yes. Another interesting dynamic is the interplay between national elites, usually focused in NY, DC, other urban cores, and local elites - the owners of the local bank, etc. etc.

Not all or even most, necessarily, but a lot of the political divide in this country can be attributed to tensions between these two elite groups.

Well that's not going to work.

How would this work? I can't gift a house or an apartment to my child?

Maybe a better way to handle it is to abolish income tax-free inheritance (I'm not talking about a wealth tax). If you make a gift of property while alive, the recipient would, if they sold it, still owe income tax on any gain in the value of the property since your acquired it. But if you die and the property is inherited, in the U.S. there is a magical basis adjustment to the fair market value on date of death, so all that income is suddenly tax free, for no particular reason.

This would be a huge blow to the middle class.

I believe strongly that other people shouldn't try to stick their hand in my pocket and dictate what I do with my money.

Moreover I find it distasteful to rob a corpse and steal from their children.

> I believe strongly that other people shouldn't try to stick their hand in my pocket and dictate what I do with my money.

Are you against all taxes then?

> Moreover I find it distasteful to rob a corpse and steal from their children.

Corpses can't own property, and nor can they vote (or protest), so they are the ideal "people" to tax.

I believe in liberty.

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