Over $70t of Inherited Wealth Over Next Decade Will Widen Inequality, Economists

If this were universally the case, open source would not exist.

European social democracies are among the top of the wealthiest countries in the world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy

Hence the proposal by many economists that the only solution is a broad agreement on a global progressive wealth tax, with at least the major blocs of the US and EU on board. See e.g. "A Brief History of Inequality".

Who has not been criticize in their methodology? Who do you expect to avoid any amount of "controversies" for such a political subject?

Your comment seems to be pure ad hominem. Also, discarding authors because they're French is kinda stupid: historically, quick advances in a field most often start at one time and place.

I think it's important to separate the empirical and analytic part, to which you can apply objective criticisms, to the political part, with which you can agree or not but which should have no bearing on the former part.

Anyway if you want to be honest you can also link to Piketty's rebuttal to the criticism, e.g. http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/Piketty2014Tec...

What do you mean "until"? It's the core of many of European "dreams".

Take UK for example, where there's a concept called "property ladder". This property ladder is the promise of ever increasing property values, to build wealth(it's a pyramid scheme). This "always appreciating" promise is not just subtextual, it's literally the core of the method for becoming wealthy.

Whole economies in Europe are built around this constant real estate appreciation and first-home-buyers' support.

This is becoming the case in US as well, to lesser extent. US has a much more dynamic property market, than the wealthy Europe.

Politicians will bend over backwards to protect this "dream"... and at this point it is screwing over the new generation.

Once you sell it you pay more taxes. Do you think any of the money you got will go to your kids, or even grandkids? Id say in 80% of all cases it will be long gone before that time comes.

This means your 800K asset maybe gives you 650K, and from that sum you still pay the inheritance tax + sales tax (thats usually in the 20% range).

You will likely get somewhere in the 450-500K for an asset that was worth 800K.

This is how to poor will remain poor.

What you do with your life is up to you, but having a guardrail can make life just that more pleasant. Life should not be about counting cents and going from pay-check to pay-check.

Isn't the fact that the ultra rich are using their wealth productively the reason we have growing wealth inequality? Because active money grows faster than inflation, which is why they get richer compared to the rest of us over time.

There is some kind of bizarre world that we live in that the article has a quote from Ramaphosa, the totality of his extraordinary wealth was generated by corruption, on the terrors of inequality.

Hoarding is, generally, not a real problem because it requires believing that wealthy people are not greedy. The problem is that most societies heavily incentivize irrational behaviour through disincentivizing investment. Strangely, these same places also have political cultures that focus heavily on inequality (again, there is no better example than South Africa) because genuine openness tends to be very disruptive politically.

There is no way to square the circle. The solutions are known, the problem is that human nature and political culture tends to prevent those solutions being realised (as it is more politically beneficial to continue to sell people lies: it is this group of people, they are the problem, if we can take their money and give it you then you will be rich).

If a net worth of $2 mil is considered outrageous then surely that kind of salary would be considered equally so.

Cool, cool. Work for 30 years, save up and have say $3M to retire on, based on stock market at an all-time high. You're not a robber baron or investment banker, just someone who worked a long time and saved and invested. Govt takes $1M away from you, you have $2M now. Market drops 25%. Now you have $1.5M.

Congrats, your "plan" resulted in someone like that having HALF of everything they saved up just gone.

Yeah, yeah, I know, "if you have $1.5M you don't NEED any more money." Sounds like something that only someone with something less than $1.5M would say.

You don't "need" your iPhone, or your flat screen, or whatever. The government should not be in the business of determining what you "need" and taking the rest.

Now that 'progress' is actively optimizing things in a way where large amounts of the public's lives are getting worse, you are going to have to give a better response. Because right now progress is synonymous with improved rent seeking, worse access to food (and food that is now noticeably optimized to be of poorer quality), worse access to housing, worse working conditions, and on, and on.

Agreed.

But isn't that an argument FOR a strong inheritance tax? Because inheritance doesn't actually help your children anyway? That seems like it was your argument.

With that argument taking 100% of the inheritance as tax and taking 0% is exactly the same, as the wealth transfer was done before anyway.

I'd much rather we have checks in place to stop individuals from accumulating megawealth in the first place (or at least slow it down), rather than relying on an inheritance tax which takes effect long after the accumulation happened.

You can perform a "child fund to the parents instead if you need earlier impact. And maybe we will need that as an incentive as 1st world populations decline. But it might not make a difference based on the spending habits of the parent.

So it's, er, probably not a great model case here.