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The taboo wealth tax debate experts say Australia can no longer ignore
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okwithmydecayNew research from the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) released on Wednesday shows that intergenerational financial support — flowing from older, wealthy family members to younger ones — is increasingly driving inequality.
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Inherited wealth is antithetical to an egalitarian society. And people whose lives have been influenced or stand to be influenced by inherited wealth are terrified of egalitarianism.
Take a moment to imagine a world where everybody started from the same point and nobody was able to ride the achievements of their parents or grandparents. We could have a true meritocracy, instead of being ruled by rich people’s spoiled kids.
And when you die, your property goes back to the state to be bought by someone else. If you started and built a company, it goes under democratic control of its employees.
Sounds pretty nice.
I’ve been thinking this for a while, it’s difficult to think about transitioning to a system like this from inside a system that we’re in now. We’re all hardwired to take advantage of anything we can get, because basic necessities are held hostage.
To start with on social change like this, I think we’d need to induce a feeling of safety in the general person. Everyone should have a baseline of their food, shelter, basic needs being met. Only after we have a generation freed from that fear of scarcity can we start making societal changes as large as this, or if we’re lucky it’ll occur by itself as a social movement.
Agreed, there’s a great deal of distance between this and that, and realistically it seems unlikely that it would ever be possible. But it sure is nice to imagine, no need or desire to accumulate more than you need in one lifetime, and nobody starting 10 steps ahead or behind.
Completely agree, that’s the kind of thinking you need to instigate change, actually being able to conceptualize a better life.
Whilst it’s certainly nice to imagine I think the reality is we need to tax wealth of the living fairly instead of waiting until they die.
Any attempt at death tax will just mean wealth gets passed on with a warm hand rather than a cold one. Plenty already does as things are now.
Yeah, we’d need a fix for that too. We need a whole new system.
Inheritance tax in concept is the perfect tax. People can enjoy fully the fruits of their labour when alive and only lose them once they have no stake in them anyway.
There are practical issues, but there are ways around that. For example, by just taxing gifts given to family members (with a tax-free threshold of, say, 5 million) as well as the inheritance tax.
As long at it only applies to the truly wealthy. Most of us strive to give our kids a little bit better than our parents could manage. A modest family home, small business, or modest investments shouldn’t be taxed. Taking away a house someone worked 40 years to pay off from family who can no longer afford payments on a house while massive profits are being extracted from this country by foreign corporations would be a massive regression.
What generally happens is the rich employ their lawyers and tax accountants to avoid paying a cent and the people who deserve a break are kept down.
Feels quite the opposite from my perspective. The amount the tax office has taken over the 2 years to clear my parent’s estate is staggering. The legal fees felt proportionate, tax hell no! Paying for dying is idiotic.