Inheriting is becoming nearly as important as working
More wealth means more money for baby-boomers to pass on. That is dangerous for capitalism and society
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Inheriting is the problem. We need a 90% inheritance tax.
Or better yet, a simple maximum wealth cap. No one should have more than 1000x the median household income. That's the kind of fortune that even the most highly paid of doctors and lawyers, if they lived as absolute paupers and invested everything, would struggle to reach within their lifetimes. Even if you earned a salary of $1 million/year and lived like you were a broke college student, you would still be very unlikely to reach that level of wealth, even if you earned that salary from age 20 til death. The only way to amass that kind of fortune is through inheritance or through exploiting the labor of others.
We need a maximum wealth cap. 1000x median household income is incredibly generous, but it would still pale in comparison to even a single billion dollars. Currently, 1000x median household income would be a cap of about $80 million. A cap there still provides great incentive to work and innovate, but it prevents anyone from amassing such a fortune that they become a threat to their nation.
I think it's the economic system that is designed to funnel money to the 1%.
More of a lack of system. Wealth concentration isn't some grand master plan centuries in the making, it happens organically and we make systems to fix the problem.
And a negative income tax to fairly distribute it to the bottom percentiles.
That would be a UBI, and yes we do.
There are actually one or two key differences. Negative Income Tax brackets would just be moving the line on the graph over such that people below a certain income would have a negative tax owed and be paid an amount indicated by their bracket. Conversely, UBI would effectively guarantee everyone in every income bracket an extra income barring specific exceptions in the legislature.
