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One of my favorite policy ideas is "25 at 25": every American inherits $25k when they turn 25 years old. At that point you've probably been in the workforce a few years, and you understand the world a little. This would everyone to take a risk on a venture or career.
Roughly 3.5m people are born each year, so it would cost about $87 billion annually. Americans inherit $427 billion annually, with 42% coming from estates larger than $1m. A 50% tax on estates >$1m would generate $89 billion, fully covering 25 at 25.
Yes, yes, I get that if you started taxing estates more ppl would evade it more, actually implementing taxes is harder than it looks. The point is directly, it would take only 20% of estates overall and 50% of estates >$1m to fund it.
The point is that by spreading out just a portion of the vast wealth of prior generations more fairly across everyone, we give people something closer to a level starting point. It hardly levels society entirely, but it'd give a lot more ppl a fair shot.
@eshear What do you think about land value tax as a much-harder-to-evade wealth tax that also creates a bunch of other good incentives? Seems very compelling to me. Buying land takes from the commons. Buying stocks puts money into businesses.