The Federal government receives about $4T per year. Without running actual numbers, I think any fluctuation in how many uber-rich people die would hugely be outweighed by the existing fluctuation due to stock market performance.
I think the existing receipts from estate tax are about 1% of total receipts (very quick Google-fu, could be wrong). The proposed changes I don’t see much more than doubling that (again, could be wrong). Particularly once the uber-rich do their matrix-fu in avoidance.
But would need a proper CBO-type analysis to know for sure. But my gut sense is that this would have a marginal, not draconian, effect on Federal tax receipts.
This is largely my issue too. When I look at some of our programs it makes you wonder how that money is spent. For instance, we spend as much on healthcare per Capita as many countries with the best healthcare outcomes, yet, our healthcare system is a disaster.
Sometimes throwing more money at a broken system isn’t the solution.
Also, I feel like the more public money that is available the more gets syphoned off by fraud and pork projects or given as corporate welfare. It rarely ends up benefiting regular people.
I feel like we have a huge accountability issue in government that needs to be addressed first.
Those are valid concerns about how tax money is spent, but seems a separate issue.
Doing something like “freeze tax law in place until everyone trusts the Federal government” doesn’t seem like an improvement on the status quo of governance.
Though certainly some classes of people, mostly the rich, would like the current tax law to be encased in amber.
I have not seen any concrete proposals from Harris on the estate tax. I have seen suggestions that Congress could let the tax cuts expire, which would bring the threshold back down to $7 million. Also seen mention of lowering the gift exemption to $10k.
Neither of these would result in material amounts of additional revenue.
Yeah I agree. While there are problems, the historic lowering of taxes for only the rich and corporations has done more damage to how public money is spent than some pork barrel projects that usually end up benefiting the public, albeit a hyper local public.
I agree, we can’t just keep things the way they are until the system is fixed. There is zero incentive to fix anything as it stands.
I think simplifying the tax code for starters would be a good place to start. Eliminate a lot of loopholes and exemptions that tend to favour the 1%.
Here, there are ways to get large estates classified as agricultural land, so you have waterfront plots of land that are worth 7 figures with huge mansions on them that pay hundreds in property tax instead of the tens of thousands they should be paying as residential properties. In addition to that, they get write-offs for purchasing heavy vehicles like luxury SUVs. It’s an absurd loop hole that should be seemingly easy to close.
That example is municipal, not federal, but there are a lot of examples out there of ways to extract money that should have been paid long ago.
I recall on one episode of Top Gear that Jeremy Clarkson said he specifically received some sort of tax credit for not planting anything on his land. Some sort of benefit for leaving the land fallow.
He must have changed his mind or the credit ended basue now he has a show on Amazon about him trying to run a farm. I suspect he earns more from the show than he does from the agriculture.