[ckemere]

Looking at the discussion I’m struck by how there are really two “goods” that are conflicting in people’s minds. Many of those of us who are parents embrace the idea of sacrificing to make our kids lives easier and better than our own. We recognize how what our parents have provided us has helped us and want to give even more to our own children/grandchildren. It seems to be a general principle of society that we should enact policies that encourage people to sacrifice for their children?

But also the accumulation of wealth drives so many negative issues in society that we want to lessen. And extreme wealth seems to make things even worse.

[ryandrake]

Society and policy makers seem to have a lot of trouble understanding scale and orders of magnitude. We declare some broad principle, like "It's good to make our kids lives easier and better than our own." and we apply it regardless of whether the dollar value is $10K, $10M, or $10B. But someone passing down $10B to their children is totally different than someone passing down $10K, and needs to be handled differently by the law. We have coarse, ham-fisted step functions like "inheritance tax only affects inheritances over $X" but you can't have a single threshold for these things. It has to be progressive with a sliding scale, otherwise you get all the negative issues around wealth accumulation.

Other Example: why can't we have income tax thresholds that go all the way up to $1T/year? Why is the absolute top income tax bracket something like $600K? Really? Are we really saying that we should tax someone who makes $600K exactly like we tax someone who makes $600M? or $6B?

[senordevnyc]

It would be awesome if we taxed someone making $6B the same as someone making $600k, but we don't even do that. When I was making $600k, I was paying close to 50%. No one making $6B is paying anywhere near $3B in taxes on that income.