Draining the Swamp

[DBTrek]

"Liberty is making decisions for yourself, and reaping the rewards or suffering the consequences of your own actions"
-You

But if your society strips me of everything I've built, at death, denying me the right to pass it down my line - then you screwed me out of the rewards I've earned. You gave fake liberty, with a "government/society take all" clause built into the endgame. That's sham liberty. That's the kind of bargain lazy people clamour for - "Plenty to go around once we fleece the dying. No need for me to bust my ass. They take it all in the end anyway, fuckit."

[Martin Hash]

Liberty is not inherited.

[Martin Hash]

Accumulating imaginary money to create an aristocracy is the antithesis of liberty. Libertarianism’s fatal flaw is that they want their liberty at the expense of everyone else.

“Most liberty to the most people.” - me

[DBTrek]

“Most liberty to the most people.” - me

Never going to achieve that with a system where a group of people are entrusted with stripping and redistributing everyone's wealth when they die. At best, you'll have two generations before the appointed "wealth strippers" are your new rich autocrats.

[Martin Hash]

It worked until Bush Jr.’s anti-inheritance taxes. We used to strip the wealthy of most of their wealth at death. If MAGA was 1980 thru Sept 11, 2001, it was Bush Jr. who killed it, not the egalitarians.

[DBTrek]

Estate tax has never been 100% after a certain amount.
Ever.
Page 122.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/ninetyestate.pdf

People are self interested.
You give a group the power to "divide" wealth of everyone who dies, they will divide it according to their own best interests.
That's not liberty.
That's kleptocracy implemented by someone who has forgotten the basics of human nature.

[Martin Hash]

Estate taxes were 55%. Inheritance taxes were 20%. The exclusion was only $1 million. Jesus, man, they got most of it. In the grand scheme of things, government income from death taxes was nothing but it did prevent aristocracy, which was the intention.

[DBTrek]

Estate taxes were 55%. Inheritance taxes were 20%. The exclusion was only $1 million. Jesus, man, they got most of it. In the grand scheme of things, government income from death taxes was nothing but it did prevent aristocracy, which was the intention.

Tell it to the Walton family, dude.
Sam Walton died in 1994, not post-GWB.

And again, taxing "dollars" is the rich man's scam to destroy the middle class.
If I'm a farming magnate, owning $200 million in farms and acreage, I'll get my liquid assets down to under $10 million easy by the time of my death. But you're not getting my farms. And since you're not getting those, all you're really doing is punishing people who deal in cash, and not assets.

Likewise, if I'm simply a highly successful landowner who lives on a $20 million farm - what are you gonna to when I die? Take it all and tell my family of farmers to fuck off? Make my farming family sell because you have some strange idea that my success has caused your lazy people to fail?

An autocrat or cabal of oligarchs swiping everyone's family wealth on account of "societal fairness" has already been tried, multiple times, under its rightful name - communism. It works poorly.

[Fife]

I gotta get busy working up the "Lifetime Trust To Let You Circumvent And Defeat The Martin Hash Complete And Total Death Tax" instrument.

Every one of these great tax notions are like a booster shot for the Lawyer Full Employment Program and serve as even more cool externalities that suck the work out of the wage slaves even more. The truth is that no compulsory tax in human history has amounted to anything other than robbery when done in the open and burglary under the cover of darkness when done the sneaky ways, like fucking around with the command currency.

Come to think of it, what does the income tax do at all really when we have a federal government that is spending untold trillions more than it could possibly take in through even completely transparent and intellectually honest strong-arm theft from the citizen-slaves?

If they are printing 3 or 4 trillion a year they don't have, what's stopping them from printing all 6 or 7 or whatever trillion they toss around the world every year now?

What if taxes don't really matter to the billionaires cause they ain't paying that shit anyway?

What if the federal government considers using the IRS as a fear factory against the working stiffs as the most important aspect of the federal tax code anyway?

[Martin Hash]

Farm land is specifically excluded from death taxes, and has been for a long time, but it shouldn’t be! What makes a damn farmer special? Why should the landed gentry get to remain the lords?

The current exclusion is $14 million; if your fuckin’ kids can’t do anything with that, what the hell? Idiocracy.