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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (42510)	2/22/2001 4:00:43 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 70976

OT re estate taxes: If we really wanted to be a meritocracy, we would reward and punish everyone as an individual, not according to what family/race/ethnic group/etc they belonged to. The logical implication of that would be a 100% estate tax. Force everyone to begin life from the same point, and earn their own way. When the sources of wealth didn't change from generation to generation, (this was the situation for all of recorded history until the Industrial Revolution) you had stable "old money", that survived intact for centuries. Today, to a large extent, the pace of technology and change in where profits are made in our economy, destroys "old money". The "old money" made in oil or cars or steel, is steadily losing ground to the "new money" from chips and software. And today's new billionaires will be eclipsed, 50 years from now, by whoever owns the Ciscos and Intels of biotech.

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (42510)	2/22/2001 5:22:30 PM
From: willcousa	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Some do and some don't. Inherited wealth has allowed many to pursue the arts - which they would not have done otherwise. If you want to break up large estates a bunch of wastrels will do it every time.

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (42510)	2/22/2001 6:21:48 PM
From: w0z	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

"Massive amounts of inherited wealth tend to decrease the incentive for excellence" Yes and no... You are absolutely correct about wealth destroying motivation as reported in the book "The Millionaire Next Door". For this reason, I and many others (Buffett, Gates, etc) decide to limit estate proceeds to children to a "reasonable" number (of course my definition of reasonable is probably a lot lower than those guys ;-) Now we come to the interesting part IMHO. Of the substantial amount which should remain at my death, I've chosen to give it to charities whose objectives I like and who are very efficient in delivering a high percentage of contributions to support their actual objective. There are a couple of organizations who rank charities by this percentage and I insist that at least 85% of funds raised are applied to fund their stated objectives. You would be amazed to see how many supposedly "great" charities fail to meet this criteria! Now here's question for all lovers of socialism: What do you think the US Government's efficiency is in delivering real programs after you subtract the cost of the bureaucracy? I don't think it's anywhere close to 85%...in fact I would guess it is below 50%. Rather than letting the US Government inefficiently manage my charitable contributions, in many cases providing disincentives to motivation IMHO, I would prefer to choose charities that are both effective and efficient. If the gift tax goes away, it simply means I will give more to charities than in my current plan since there will be more left after the base portion I leave to my children. I also suspect a lot of estate attorneys could be put to more productive use! BTW, didn't the collapse of the USSR adequately demonstrate the corner case of a supposedly egalitarian government ruining the motivation of people? How soon some of us forget!