Death taxes are morally wrong. Warning swearblogging!!

I was browsing “comment is free” in the guardian newspapers on-line version when I came across the following article. It was so smug and devoid of any rational moral defence I think its worth a brief Fisking just to keep my hand in.

Try this for an opening line.

Death tax: the stimulus we need

Because we are necrophiliacs at the tax office?

Hello, can I dig up your grandfather and pinch his gold fillings?

More below, plus a number of naughty words.

 

Traditionally, the left has tended to assume the moral arguments for inheritance tax and ignore the economic ones. But the fact is that raising inheritance tax from the current 40% over £600,000 (which only affects 3% of the wealthiest estates) makes economic sense. By using this budget to raise inheritance tax, the government could improve our fiscal position and create a fairer society.

What moral arguments do you have for confiscating 40% of what a person wishes to hand on after they are dead do you have you festering pin eyed waste of smegma? That money has been taxed multiple times before it came to be just “over 600,000 pounds”. There has been income tax, business taxes, fees for services, taxes on any employees paid, and a multitude of monies forked out before it was just “there”. And pray tell how will society be fairer by confiscating 40% + of money just because the person with it inconveniences the tax office by dying and no longer being able to produce lucre for them to piss up the wall?

First and most obviously, the tax itself would bring in a much-needed source of revenue for the state and help service our debt.

No it wont, you will piss it up the wall and call for more money. The key to servicing debt is to stop spending BEFORE the amounts exceed your income, and the ability to service it. Millions of people around the world do it every day, you should try it.

Second, if people knew they weren’t going to be able to pass on the money they earned, they’d be less likely to hoard it and more likely to spend it.

Yup, overseas holidays, tax havens, moving to countries that don’t confiscate your money, your right, it can be used in some useful ways. Namely getting it out of  your bloodless little paws.

Ed called, he'd like some credit for your tax policies.

At a time when we need to collectively kickstart spending, this could provide a well-needed stimulus to the economy. Sure, the rich would contribute by far and away the most to this scheme, but it would be in the collective interest. For once, let’s let the rich benefit from the trickle down.

Well the best part of you trickled down your mothers leg after the fleet left town. How does reducing a persons choice in what happens to their hard earned money after they die become a business of the state? Its just envy that some are born with more than others, deal with it, I don’t have john Holmes dick and you don’t have Pamela Andersons tits, life is full of disappointments. How about you get a big cup of harden the fuck up and worry about your own life. If you become successful and wealthy then you will be able to pay the sort of tax you think you deserve?

Adam Smith famously supported inheritance tax, and as Will Huttonhas pointed out, it has been defended by 120 billionaires in the States. Indeed if you’re a true freemarketer, you’ll support inheritance tax because it delivers correct incentives – it says that individuals should be rewarded simply according to what they put in. Giving people cash for nothing is effectively an incentive for laziness. After all, if welfare payments sap dynamism, why doesn’t inheritance?

And that will be nearly the only time you will see Adam Smith mentioned in a positive way on a Guardian blog. What you fail to realise is that the wealth will disappear if the inheritor is feckless, or unwise with their money. Therefore that stimulus you appear to desire will still happen, its just a living person will benefit/enjoy it first. I intend to die wealthy and leave a motza of money to my closest family, thats my ambition in life. For some statist bint to claim my dough based entirely on “what you wanted doesn’t matter, your dead now” is obscene in the extreme. Why not dig up dead prostitutes and charge a buck a bang, after all they have something to “stimulate the economy” as well eh? I consider you no better than necrophiliacs, you take what the dead wouldn’t willingly give you by force.

Mmm, dead people, my favourite!

Inheritance doesn’t just distort incentives, it also undermines allocative efficiency. By handing down huge amounts of wealth, inheritors are given a huge and arbitrary advantage over others. When parents can pay for private education and massively better facilities for their children, you get an economically unsound situation as well as a morally unfair one.

So parents shouldn’t be able to use their hard earned money to purchase what they see as a good education for their kids? Does a private schooling mean that kids from normal schools lose money of facilities?  Does it make the teachers at those schools less capable than those at a private school? Here’s a newsflash, its human nature to want your progeny to have better than you had. I know of people making quite low wages so they can send their kids to private schools, they deprive themselves for their kids, and you would say they “buy an unfair advantage” Get fucked you rancid fucking cow.

It means that those who are born with the most get the best, most influential jobs rather than those with the most ability. Less able people in top jobs reduces productivity for all. Fairness and free markets demand level playing fields.

What a load of mealy mouthed pure shit. Some turds will float to the top based on connections. But I ask you, how many useless shits float through life based on connections to a political party/uni education/membership of a sports club/good looks/right opinions etc? And again that’s a self correcting problem, if an organisation is filled with a bunch of Euro-brats or “hooray Henrys”, then it will go from a big business to a smaller one. Organisations staffed by those with the most ability will rise. Free markets don’t, and never have advocated confiscating wealth, dismantling enterprises to pay tax burdens and impoverishing the families of the wealthy.

Unlike many other taxes, raising inheritance tax is not likely to distort incentives. Taxes that increase with higher income earnings, for example, are criticised for deterring people from pushing that little bit harder at the margin. But because inheritance tax is a lump-sum redistribution after earnings, this problem is side stepped. Workers are allowed to keep their entire marginal product, and there is no dead weight loss. In fact, if the left knew that more earnings would be passed on at the end of a person’s lifetime, they might well be more lenient about giving bigger bonuses as incentives for hard workers.

The breathtaking fucktardedness of the opening sentence there is to be admired.

Telling people they cant pass on their lives work to their chosen person/s wont distort incentives? How mind bogglingly stupid is that? If Australia was to bring back death duties Id be first in line to ship my money overseas. Id liquidate my assets at the first sign of ill health and relocate to a better location. The government wouldn’t see fuck all of it, a company (which creates wealth) would be closed and you’d get nothing. I wouldn’t give you the steam off my shit.

Although the last line of her paragraph does come dangerously close to outdoing the mental aberration that is the first. “they might well be more lenient about giving bigger bonuses as incentives for hard workers.” Bwahahahaha!!! pull the other one you daft bint.

As I’ve said before, economic argumentsare now the left’s to make. In the current financial crisis, passing on huge quantities of wealth seems morally untenable.

Except you haven’t touched on morality beyond your own festering envy of those who’s parents were better people than you are. Their kids might be wholly undeserving pissheads, druggies, wasters and scum. But it was their parents who created that wealth, not you, or the state. If Mrs Bigguns decides to leave her wealth to a cats home rather than her nephew (who’s a feckless toady) that’s her fucking choice to do so.

Ken Clarke’s recent “hoo-ha” shows that even the Conservatives are beginning to get that. While many through no fault of their own are losing jobs and houses, others – through no merit of their own – are being allowed to inherit millions. Political pragmatism has prevented Labour from raising inheritance tax in the past, but the mood has now changed. The government should make the most of it and raise inheritance tax for the economic and moral good.

Again there is nothing moral about stealing money from the dead. Why not insist on jewelry, dentures, hair, surgical implants being removed from the dead as well? Just think of how much lucre is lying in the ground hidden away in teeth.

That’s your fucking morality, the morality of the grave robber.

 

Standard statist scum line.

You start from a position of envy that maybe your family wasn’t as well off as the Toffs. How did they get wealthy you say. Must have been unearned somehow. Then you start to think of ways to get your own back, after all daddy didn’t buy me a pony….

 

Why not make prostitution compulsory? After all you ladies are sitting on a potential unearned gold mine aren’t you?

That’s about it for this little Fisking/swearblogging attempt. it was fun for me, I might do it again later on if I see a similar collection of wankery disguised as rational thinking.

 

Im happy Australia got rid of that tax, however I’m also worried that with the greens support (and it is one of their stated policies to re-introduce it) and Rudds never ending spending it may be resurrected.

The people who support this are mad, they must at some stage believe if one person gets ahead everyone else loses out. Here’s a newsflash, nearly every business started off with risk, capital and hard work. You intend to remove access to at least one of those props. By removing “unfair” capital from the wealthy, which can be used to create jobs and therefore increase overall tax receipts to a government, you are cutting off your nose to spite your face.

If i earn $2000 a week and Joe earns $1000, dropping my wage to $1000 wont make him richer. Quite the opposite, I may no longer have the discretionary income to have a restaurant meal once a week. Joe may be laid off because the restaurant has closed. If Australia was ever stupid enough to listen to me id advocate a bare minimum of tax on company earnings. By doing that I think it would be realistic to see an overall increase in taxation receipts due to greater employment. (mad I know)