What I found most unpleasant in [Abi] Wilkinson’s article [advocating a 100% inheritance tax] is her acceptance that there could be “a small allowance for objects of sentimental value.” It brought the reality of the idea home. Imagine relatives being forced to beg to keep their family heirlooms. Your granddad’s books? Well, okay. It’s not as if they’re first editions. Your mother’s piano? Sorry, pal. Too big for this allowance. Your grandmother’s house? Forget it. We’re selling it off.
Ben Sixsmith finds another Guardian writer with a spiteful confiscation fetish. One of these.
Like ghouls robbing graves.
The politics of envy, resentment , and hatred, all festering in a typical bankrupt welfare state coming to a place near you sooner than you think. I’m sure Butts has a plan just as soon as he can get selfie-boy out of the next pride parade.
The underlying premise in Wilkenson’s position is that the state owns/controls the person and by extension the property and possessions of the person. He obviously does not agree with the idea that government is “of the people, by the people, for the people”. He also overlooks or ignores the fact that the property of the deceased was most likely paid for my money that was already taxed as income, thus setting up a twice-taxed situation.
a twice-taxed situation
I’m finding out just how much the government loves when its citizens die. I’m in the process of settling my father’s estate and I’m already in hock over my ears because I had to borrow money to pay the probate fee.
I’m dreading the income tax on the estate, which I’ve already estimated. In order to pay that, I’ll have to sell some investments and–guess what–that means even more taxes as there will be capital gains.
Oh, and don’t forget that many of the transactions with the government come at a price as well. Filing the probate documents? $200, please. Will search? Let’s start at $20 and go from there are one has to look for all sorts of variations on the deceased’s name.
The attitude of the government seems to be that I should either be glad I even get anything or that I should rejoice at what’s left over after it finishes financially mauling me.
“…overlooks or ignores the fact …”
If that fact is only overlooked, just bring that to his attention and he’ll ignore it, too. That’s how such people are.
A lot of the great houses of Scotland were lost through taxation. The owners let them go derelict and moved into the cottage next door.
nothing in the article about this level of taxation is like buying the best impregnable floor safe for 55,000,000 in order to ‘protect’ gold worth 55,000,000. you have to sell the gold (chase people out of the country, pay huge amounts to administer the seizures) in order to buy the safe. at which point there is NOTHING left to protect, NOTHING that ‘needs’ a ‘safety net’.
I have a form of autism. I think in very literal almost exaggerated logical terms (think Spock with a sense of humour). I cannot fathom, even *after* attempting to ‘adjust’ my analysis of such positions how in gawds name they are supposed to work in the real world.
jeezuz murphy.
No worries, when the state ends up owning everything, no need to worry about “inheriting” anything. The state will take care of themselves, I mean you.
Two mass starvations, several concentration camps and countless genocides via socialism in the last 100 years? Shut up racist, or you’ll join them.
In China, they couldn’t even keep their kitchen cutlery, it went into the state warehouse, right next to the mass graveyard.
It all starts with “investments” with our money, for others, when finally the spread around has thickened to where the state has all your disposable income.
Who needs money, there’s nothing on the shelves anyway; except at the apparatchik good little party worker store; all hail the overload antifascist.
Who can’t see the obvious utility in being serf comrades as Marx promised? So what if the world has never been richer, hobgoblins must remain.
How else do you think these fools could ever make money in the real world except to save us from it, while we pay for their phony baloney jobs?
At least we’re united in our misery and saved from our atomized liberty and prosperity, which isn’t good for them, uh, us.
First they come for your wealth, all of it, then they come for your life. When it happens, remember not to complain.
If the columnist feels that one’s property (even family heirlooms) should be seized for the greater good, perhaps she should do as a Wise Carpenter once instructed and give her goods to the poor.
Or perhaps that state-willed generosity works only one way.
This twit also fails to keep in mind how many people leave money to charities when they pass on. So there’s that.
The average Leftist absolutely HATES generational wealth. The Left SEETHES with anger and HATRED for every Trust Fund Baby ever born into privilege … even if the inheritance is paltry. Why ? Because the left, which CELEBRATES single mothers (aka a vow of lifelong poverty) cannot stand seeing successful two-parent nuclear families. So the Left invented the new manifesto of “privilege”. It is now a “privilege” to have a mom and a dad. A “privilege” to have parents who read books to their children (single mothers are too busy for such luxuries). So imagine the “privilege” of inheriting the wealth from parents who worked hard, made smart life-decisions, and kept their families intact !? How DARE these families MOCK single mothers !? Mocking them by the “normals” well-adjusted children and inheritances.
They claim it’s for the “greater good”. I think the greater good would be served by rewarding people for hard work so they can help their family. Money and possessions, yes, but every bit the result of dedication and concern for their descendents. That builds a strong, stable society.
“parents who read books to their children” I have seen that mentioned more and more often. They keep saying that it’s just something to think about….but i shudder to imagine what they might come up with after they’re done thinking. (aka – plotting)
The average Leftist absolutely HATES generational wealth.
It particularly hates generational wealth in the working class. It’s seen as a betrayal of the revolution.
My father was a tradesman and worked hard for most of his life, being well-paid for his labour. By doing so, he paid off the house in about 15 years. Each time he bought a new truck, he earned that money back in about a year. Everything he owned was paid for.
Whatever he had left over after paying his bills and taking care of daily expenses, he saved and invested.
Thanks to his efforts, I inherited a nice estate.
When I was young, one of the books my mother read to me had yellow pages. She used the telephone book to teach me to read, so she not only entertained me by doing so, I received an education.
“setting up a twice-taxed situation”
Like privately buying a car.
PRIVILEGE !!! PRIVILEGE !!!! You are the ENEMY !!! You must be DESTROYED !!! By TAKING everything YOU never worked-for. How DARE you be economically-advantaged !! We need to LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD by stripping you of all your ill-gotten gains! All the FREE STUFF you got from “accident of birth”. Like being born into a Western, Capitalist, country of enormous wealth. YOUR greedy inheritance needs to be re-distributed to single mothers from Mexico and Somalia !!! Redistributed to husbands and husbands, and wife and wives everywhere !! Every “artist” with neck tattoos needs a piece of your estate !!! You GREEDY mother-effing bastard !!!
sarc. off
BTW … you are spot on about particularly HATING middle class wealth and success. The narrative of the Left is that the middle class MUST be destroyed, because a healthy middle class represents Capitalism’s success. That in a … “system built on greed” … workers of modest means can thrive is simply untenable to leftists. I am somewhat like your father. Born with next to nothing, and building a nice nest egg on a modest white collar salary … frugality … and simple, sane, decisions about money. I have never “chased” money … but simply used what I had intelligently … and never felt the need to “project” wealth as a false symbol of worth.
The communists here in Canada are represented by the New Democratic Party, which, laughably, bills itself as “socialist”. It absolutely hates the capitalistic class, regardless of which level it’s at.
For one thing, it behaves as if legitimately earning money is theft, a crime against society that must be severely punished. We have an example of that here in Alberta with Premier Rachel “I Love Che Guevara” Notley who likes nothing better than to thwart, if not destroy, capitalism.
On the other hand, it embraces champagne socialists and limousine liberals. One example of its heroines is Naomi Klein, someone who’s loaded but who dictates to those whose financial worth is less than hers how they should live…. or else.
Even before I inherited my father’s estate, I had built a nice financial portfolio on my own. I simply followed what my parents did by spending wisely what money I had, saving what was left over, and carefully investing some of that. Not bad for someone who spent much of the 1980s out of work because there weren’t any jobs for someone with my background and who lived off dole cheques during that time.
I suppose that makes me “privileged” as well, doesn’t it?
Not only are the lefties that make such proposals morally blind, but they have little or no practical sense. Once confiscatory taxation is applied to privately accumulated capital, it will be either dissipated (i.e. people will decide to die as paupers and let the state look after them in their old age); hidden (i.e. gifted or otherwise disposed of in ways that circumvent the tax system) or completely removed from the jurisdiction imposing the confiscatory tax. Any of these will contribute to the impoverishment of the jurisdiction imposing such a tax. They are literally killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Not that I wish to encourage statists, God knows we have enough taxes already, but there are ways of taxing estates that will leave something there to be taxed. A smart tax man always sets the rate of tax to sustainably harvest, not drive away wealth. If paying the tax is the least cost way of dealing with estate transition, the citizens will grumble, but they will pay. Otherwise they will do everything in their power to avoid the tax. The nanny state has allowed these post modern lefties to survive their own stupidity for so long, they think proposals like this can actually work.
Brilliant point(s)! And I might add that RICH people can live ANYWHERE they want (for now, anyway). RICH people will MOVE their “primary domicile” OUT of confiscatory states and into tax-favorable States. Then, establish “vacation” homes in high tax States … or any number of other arrangements. The low-information voters hear disingenuous leftist politicians say “TAX THE RICH” … and they cheer along … KILL the RICH!!!! Yeayyyy !!!! Without ever knowing that these are nothing but empty words meant to resonate in hollowed-out skulls.
The Guardian article is like what my grandfather could have read in the Bolshevik paper Pravda in 1917, except he would not have picked up that paper. Although on second thought, maybe he did and that is why he escaped when he had the chance.
In Britain you are taxed on money given to your children while you are still living. I don’t know the amount of this gift tax or the amounts in question. I believe the banks police this.
I’ve been told that there is no inheritance tax here in Canada. Actually, there is, but it isn’t specifically called that. The estate is the entity that’s taxed, resulting in the beneficiaries getting less than they would otherwise have received.
No matter what it’s called and where in the process it’s extracted, the government will always get its cut.
Thanks for your reply, Kenji, and, in perfect illustration of your point, iconic French actor Gerard Depardieu, responded to a confiscatory wealth tax in France by leaving the country and taking up residence in — Russia. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11844532/Actor-Gerard-Depardieu-to-sell-everything-in-France.html
One other potential response to confiscatory taxation that I neglected to mention in my original post, is simply the demoralization of the working population because they are now less incented to strive and achieve. Mediocre population, mediocre economy, and these feed on themselves in a vicious cycle to produce individual and social poverty. In 1819 Daniel Webster said: “the power to tax is the power to destroy” and that fact has not changed. http://www.bartleby.com/73/1798.html
When people die, let’s cut down all the trees they have planted during their life and use the wood for the greater good.
anybody want a used complete scuba diving outfit?
that’s all I could afford and a few other things after my papa with his grade 4 edjukashun passed away in 1982
and left me and 6 siblings the house that was paid for.
will I have to give it to some ‘deserving’ socialist? maybe I can sabotage the regulator so it shuts off at 100 feet.
when they come for your life, kill them.