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23 comments

  • Why should farmers be exempt from inheritance tax that applies to everyone else? It's a method of wealth redistribution, not just income distribution, it's actually quite socialist, and one of the only such measures in our system.

    Millionaire farmers driving around in their tractors protesting that when they die, their wealth shouldn't be redistributed to any degree is pathetic.

    • Why should farmers be exempt from inheritance tax that applies to everyone else?

      In theory, the problem is one of compounding assets. If you have a family farm with multiple inheriting children and the farm has to be sold to pay off the inheritence tax debt, who buys them? Inevitably, bigger industrial agriculture firms. So more and more plots are aggregated within a smaller and smaller number of privately owned farming companies.

      In practice, this has already happened decades prior (centuries prior, if you look at the history of land ownership in Ireland). The people buying up small plots of land aren't pioneering farmer entrepreneurs. They're people explicitly looking to dodge taxes by converting their accumulated wealth into an untaxable asset. So you're not seeing small farmers shielded from consolidation thanks to inheritance taxes. You're seeing celebrities and mega-millionaires shielding cash assets behind an accounting trick.

      Millionaire farmers driving around in their tractors protesting that when they die, their wealth shouldn’t be redistributed to any degree is pathetic.

      Wealth in the UK isn't being redistributed, its being aggregated. The prior and current governments have gone all in on private equity as a cure for sluggish growth. This is purely Rich Guy on Rich Guy violence.

      If you genuinely care about protecting the assets of the working class, you need less middling Starmerism and more radical Maoism.

      The maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry

      • Michael Parenti

    • I live in a rural area and speak to lots of farmers. Chatting to one of my neighbours in the pub about it and they're righteously angry about it.

      Drill down into their assets though and they have: modest sheep flock and attendant land, equipment etc, large family home, profitable machining and engineering business, separate from the farm, 4 other properties that they let their children live in rent free or rent out to other tenants.

      I do think that the government is using a hammer to tighten a screw, but my sympathy ends for farmers when they're hoarding assets to that degree and that isn't even particularly large when I compare it to some of the families I work for. One I can name employs around 200 people in a major dairy operation with dozens of old family farms consolidated into the ownership of 3 siblings.

      Land and farm assets like animals, equipment etc should be exempt so that they're not just bought up by corporations. The rest should be subject to the same level of taxation as the rest of the country has to pay.

      • The corporations should just be taxed twice as heavily on it, reducing tax isn't the answer to prevent corporations buying up the farms. As they don't die, corporations should just have to pay 'inheritance' tax every 50 years.

  • Tax breaks for the farmers working the fields, or tax breaks for the international corporations and land speculators that own nearly all the fields?

23 comments