The estate tax is a bad tax say 727 economists

[Spectral]

I don't see a lot of evidence being presented in this thread about the economic efficiency of estate taxes, which is what I actually care about.

[Ettan]

Your first sentence is wrong and with that the entire way of thinking is wrong.

Just ask the banks who had to be bailed out.....what do you think would have happened if governments didn't do that?

It's not a zero sum game.

No Its not, It is factually correct.
Any form of regulation, taxation, min wages, anything really.
Ask anyone with a degree in economy.
Something is lost for either the consumers, producers, or the workers themselves.

The "least negative" tool goverments has-> is control of the money supply (in a slow and controlled manner).
As Milton Friedman advocated as a tool to avoid big reccesions.

When you talk about saving banks? This is a form of goverement spending, not regulation/taxation.
But still this is not neccesarily a positive. (Its Keynesian politics; J.Maynard Keynes increased government spending to combat ressesions; Rosevelt new deal/ truman act ect ect.)
It has been proven to be quite effective but it ignores the fact that these banks face disaster for a reason; Meaning saving them will only allow them to continue their innefective practises.
Read J.A. Schumpeters theory of Creative Destruction.
(in short you let the bad apples die naturally; to allow for fertile grounds for new ideas and businesses to flourish)

[ati87]

No Its not, It is factually correct.
Any form of regulation, taxation, min wages, anything really.
Ask anyone with a degree in economy.
Something is lost for either the consumers, producers, or the workers themselves.

The "least negative" tool goverments has-> is control of the money supply (in a slow and controlled manner).
As Milton Friedman advocated as a tool to avoid big reccesions.

When you talk about saving banks? This is a form of goverement spending, not regulation/taxation.
But still this is not neccesarily a positive. (Its Keynesian politics; J.Maynard Keynes increased government spending to combat ressesions; Rosevelt new deal/ truman act ect ect.)
It has been proven to be quite effective but it ignores the fact that these banks face disaster for a reason; Meaning saving them will only allow them to continue their innefective practises.
Read J.A. Schumpeters theory of Creative Destruction.
(in short you let the bad apples die naturally; to allow for fertile grounds for new ideas and businesses to flourish)

The EU and US regulated Microsoft and you know what happened?

We got Firefox shortly after which has resulted in a entire new market that really didn't exist before in other words the entire segment of computer grew the moment governments became more strict with Microsoft.

If we where all forced to keep on using IE (which in a way we where) the overall quality and size (in economic terms) of the Internet would be allot smaller (that's how crap IE was). But since we got Firefox it spurred a entire new market that has increased the overall value of the internet market.

[Draco-Onis]

Alternatively, we could vote for representatives who repeal or change taxes that we deem as immoral, like the Republicans just did with tax reform.

But the estate tax is still around they just increased the threshold.

[Spiffums]

Theft is when something is taken without your permission. You agree to pay taxes. Thus taxation is not theft. Disliking paying taxes does not mean there is a lack of consent.

Plenty of money is taxed multiple times. “Double taxation” is just a nonsense right-wing talking point. Your money is taxed when you earn it from your job, it is taxed again when you spend it, it is taxed again for the company that sold you a thing, it is taxed again when they use that money to pay their employee, it is taxed again when that employee buys something, and so on.

I’m sorry it hurts your feelings, but money is taxed when it changes hands, over and over.

Income tax is voluntary..........don't volunteer to pay and see what happens to you. It's not an agreed to think if there are penalties for not agreeing to it.

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TAXCEPTION!!!!!!!

But seriously the entire argument on the OPs article is pretty bogus when applying it to any real world situation. But hey, guess this is what happens when political bribing is legal and you voted for the guy that didn't want to get rid of it.

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Taxation is as much theft is as breathing is affecting the climate.

You fucking twelve year olds man have no literal idea how the world works. Read a book and then figure out which government institution paid for those books and your ability to fucking read them.

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Seriously. I am sick and tired of 'taxation is theft' when the reality is taxation is the only literal way for society to progress as a whole.

Otherwise the wealth would just pool at the top, you know. Exactly how capitalism worked before 1924. Amazing how 100 years of recorded history has allowed us to come full circle back to a generation with the belief the free market reigns supreme.

Why don't you read a book and figure out that America got by for more than half it's lifetime without Federal Taxes.

I'm sure the serfs just loved to work for the high lords for room and board.

[oxymoronic]

Income tax is voluntary..........don't volunteer to pay and see what happens to you. It's not an agreed to think if there are penalties for not agreeing to it.

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Why don't you read a book and figure out that America got by for more than half it's lifetime without Federal Taxes.

I'm sure the serfs just loved to work for the high lords for room and board.

and without highways! i prefer the life we live now thx

[JerseyGhoul]

Income tax is voluntary..........don't volunteer to pay and see what happens to you. It's not an agreed to think if there are penalties for not agreeing to it.

Your employer agreed to require its workers to pay taxes, if you don't want to work at an employer that legally operates in the US, you are free to choose another place of employment.

Again, just because paying your taxes hurts your feelings, doesn't mean taxes are theft. Just because you might not understand how contracts and consent work, doesn't mean taxes are theft.

I can't walk into your house and declare that your purchase of said house is invalid and your contract is void just because I want to own your house. Likewise, you cannot invalid the agreement of two other parties, such as your employer and the government, just because you don't want to pay taxes.

[unbound]

When you die, before your heirs get anything the estate tax is deducted from your estate. Usually this only applies if your estate is over millions of dollars. It's one way of taxing the 1%.

Milton Friedman is a well known economist who wrote this open letter.

Ah, Milton Friedman. He did great work regarding consumption behavior, and everything else after that has fallen apart. But he does lead a significant number of naive libertarian economists who take his word as given from a god (all of whom ignore that his predictions have failed miserably). The letter is just more of his current nonsense focus on monetarism (which doesn't work).

Monetarism was a powerful force in economic debate for about three decades after Friedman first propounded the doctrine in his 1959 book A Program for Monetary Stability. Today, however, it is a shadow of its former self, for two main reasons.

First, when the United States and the United Kingdom tried to put monetarism into practice at the end of the 1970s, both experienced dismal results: in each country steady growth in the money supply failed to prevent severe recessions. The Federal Reserve officially adopted Friedman-type monetary targets in 1979, but effectively abandoned them in 1982 when the unemployment rate went into double digits. This abandonment was made official in 1984, and ever since then the Fed has engaged in precisely the sort of discretionary fine-tuning that Friedman decried. For example, the Fed responded to the 2001 recession by slashing interest rates and allowing the money supply to grow at rates that sometimes exceeded 10 percent per year. Once the Fed was satisfied that the recovery was solid, it reversed course, raising interest rates and allowing growth in the money supply to drop to zero.

Second, since the early 1980s the Federal Reserve and its counterparts in other countries have done a reasonably good job, undermining Friedman’s portrayal of central bankers as irredeemable bunglers. Inflation has stayed low, recessions—except in Japan, of which more in a second—have been relatively brief and shallow. And all this happened in spite of fluctuations in the money supply that horrified monetarists, and led them—Friedman included—to predict disasters that failed to materialize. As David Warsh of The Boston Globe pointed out in 1992, “Friedman blunted his lance forecasting inflation in the 1980s, when he was deeply, frequently wrong.”

....

Friedman’s laissez-faire absolutism contributed to an intellectual climate in which faith in markets and disdain for government often trumps the evidence. Developing countries rushed to open up their capital markets, despite warnings that this might expose them to financial crises; then, when the crises duly arrived, many observers blamed the countries’ governments, not the instability of international capital flows. Electricity deregulation proceeded despite clear warnings that monopoly power might be a problem; in fact, even as the California electricity crisis was happening, most commentators dismissed concerns about price-rigging as wild conspiracy theories. Conservatives continue to insist that the free market is the answer to the health care crisis, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Very detailed write-up here, but if you are truly interested in the history of the man and his failures, well worth the read - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007...lton-friedman/

[Rennadrel]

Well, the rich will have to put their money in shoe boxes rather than making interest in bank accounts so that they avoid paying taxes.