Let’s talk about death taxes in America. You will hear the line about paying taxes when you’re alive and then paying taxes when you die. I checked this out a few years ago, so this information is out of date, but that means the exemptions have only gone higher.
While you’re alive, you could gift about $10k to each child per year, from each parent. This meant if you had 3 kids, you could do a tax free wealth transfer of $60k per year. When you died, you could give each child $10 million, again per parent. This means the absolute minimum wealth required to pay an estate tax on was $10 million, providing the wealth was held by only one person and they only had one child. If the scenario above was used, with 2 parents owning the wealth jointly and having 3 children, you could transfer $60 million, plus another $600k if you had started working on your estate planning 10 years before you died. And even then, you were only paying taxes on the portion above the tax-free amounts listed above. All of this doesn’t even require any trusts or other tax haven’t shenanigans.
tl;dr Pretty much anyone who is paying estate taxes can afford to.
darthelmet@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
If only it were just dudes. My mom is like this. I can get her to agree with that things need to be better and that social spending is good but… when I explain to her that we need to tax billionaires to do that suddenly it’s “BUT THEY EARNED THEIR MONEY! WE SHOULDN’T TAKE IT FROM THEM!!!”
Flower@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
The classic circular reasoning.
“They’re rich because they worked hard for that money so they earn it. How do you know they worked hard? Because they’re rich of course. If they didn’t work hard they wouldn’t be rich!”
Dookieman12@piefed.social 9 hours ago
Ask her why that line of thinking doesn’t apply to her. She earned her money. Why should they take it?
darthelmet@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
I do try to explain that, but she just won’t listen. It’s like there’s a mental block stopping the connection from happening.
The crazy thing is she’s worked insanely hard in her career and until a couple years ago barely made any money from it. (Although some of that is the gender inequality of her being out of work to take care of us when we were young for a few years.) She doesn’t understand how her being this hardworking professional who still only makes enough for a middle class income is different than someone who’s never worked a day in their life siphoning money off of workers so they can buy their 3rd mansion, private jets, and elections and somehow still has MORE money after all of that.