Michael Kinsley - The Senate's Estate Tax Debate - washingtonpost.com.
The online article is titled "Democrats for Rich Heirs?":
Perusing the Forbes 400 list of America's richest people, it's striking how few of them made the list by building the proverbial better mousetrap. The most common route to gargantuan wealth, like the route to smaller piles, remains inheritance. The ability to pass money along to your kids may motivate many a successful executive or investor to work harder, but it can't possibly motivate those kids to inherit harder in order to pass it along once again.
Dozens of Forbes 400 fortunes derive from the rising value of land or other natural resources. These businesses are fundamentally different from mousetrap building. Land does not need to become "better" to increase in value, and that value increase doesn't produce more land. Yet other fortunes depend directly on the government. The large fortunes based on health care and pharmaceuticals would not exist if not for Medicare and Medicaid. The government hands out large fortunes even more directly in forms as varied as
- cable-TV franchises;
- cellphone licenses;
- drilling, mining and mineral rights;
- minority small-business loans; and
- other special treatment.
LVTfan here: The privilege of calling OUR natural resources MINE is a major one, and we're so used to it that we don't even notice it.
The oil revenue (and other like revenue -- see Mason Gaffney's article, The Hidden Taxable Capacity of Land for a listing of some of the things which the classical economists would recognize as land), that currently flows to individuals -- be they Jed Clampetts, or large property owners rural or just choice-land owners urban -- or corporations (ditto!) should be treated as OURS. Then we wouldn't need to tax wages so much -- and maybe not at all.
And we'd all have an equal opportunity under such a scenario.
Comments