Posted on 08/21/2023 3:14:15 PM PDT by CaptainK
Vivek Ramaswamy’s Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence offers a plea for the reinvigoration of American life. Based on the title, one might think that this book is a dystopian screed. It is not. Ramaswamy simply dreams of better things for the nation he loves. “If Americans come to see themselves as fellow citizens rather than each other’s victims,” he suggests, “then our Union can and should stay together.” Ramaswamy does not imagine a Golden Age to which we should return. Instead, he loves America today: “Next to most of the world,” he writes, “we live in a land of milk and honey.” America is “still the land of opportunity.” Indeed, it is.....
Third, to confront multigenerational wealth, Ramaswamy embraces inheritance taxes as a way to “save meritocracy from degenerating into aristocracy.” Ramaswamy flirts with a suggestion by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez to set the optimal inheritance tax rate in the United States at 59%. Lest you hope, as I did, that he might eventually walk that number back, he doubles down: “If anything, I’d take the figure Piketty and Saez arrive at as a minimum. We shouldn’t allow people to become billionaires just by having rich parents.”
(Excerpt) Read more at lawliberty.org ...
I’m nearly 65.
If I was to start a business I would want to pass it on.
An inheritance tax simply allows people with good banking or other financing connections to buy the extraordinary work of a lifetime merely for signing a document.
It’s money that has already been taxed. It’s disgusting.
It’s also an indication to me that, in his heart, he’s a tax lover.
Should we allow people to become billionaires because they are ‘big club’ members?
https://startupsavant.com/top-venture-capital-firms
It was a thought experiment, not an actual proposal. He talks about the inheritance tax idea at 39:50
https://www.youtube.com/live/B7e1i3Pfhc8
“William Kissam Vanderbilt II, the great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, was an auto-racing enthusiast and created the Vanderbilt Cup, the first major road racing competition, in 1904. He ran the races on local roads in Nassau County during the first decade of the 20th century, but the deaths of two spectators and injury to many others showed the need to eliminate racing on residential streets. Vanderbilt responded by establishing a company to build a graded, banked and grade-separated highway suitable for racing that was also free of the horse manure dust often churned up by motor cars. The resulting Long Island Motor Parkway, with its banked turns, guard rails, reinforced concrete roadbed, and controlled access, was the first limited-access roadway in the world.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Island_Motor_Parkway
Should we tax inheritance at 59% (at the low end)?
It would behoove people to independently research claims about candidates policies and ideas. Understand there is a nasty game of taking candidates out of context. I’ve watched a lot of long form interviews with Ramaswamy and not once have I heard him talk about inheritance taxes. If he had designs on making inheritance taxes a part of his policies he would be blatantly honest about it. He doesn’t hold back on what he wants to do and a vast majority of what he wants to do will not be liked by the left, RINOs and the administrative state. He is going to come under heavy fire if he continues to gain traction.
He is certainly over the target and will draw more flack.
I like what he’s saying. We could use more like him.
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