Death and taxes are said to be the only inevitabilities. They just shouldn’t come at the same time. Unless, of course, you’re a Labor government that has blown the national savings and is desperately scrambling for any other peoples’ money it can get its claws on. Even if, as George Harrison said, you have to pinch the pennies from dead men’s eyes.
They dress it up as an ‘intergenerational transfer tax’, which sounds almost compassionate. But do not be fooled. This is a tax on family itself, on the radical notion that what you grow and save might outlive you.
The pitch always starts with moral preening. ‘The inheritors did not earn it,’ they sniff, as if moral purity suddenly matters in public finance.
Neither did grasping lefties, but that doesn’t stop them trying to nick it.
Apparently, it is virtuous to confiscate what others earned, provided the victim is already dead.
But theft does not become righteous just because the corpse cannot complain.
One of the great sins of a government-mandated theft, oops, ‘tax’, is taxing what’s already been taxed. Attempting to tax franking credits, which had already been taxed, went a large way to ending Bill Shorten’s tilt for the prime ministership. Yet, that’s exactly what inheritance taxes are: taxing wealth that’s already been taxed. And taxed. And taxed.
The deceased saved their money from after-tax income; they paid GST on every purchase; and they paid Medicare levies, NDIS levies, capital gains, stamp duty, and council rates. By the time the government shows up at the funeral, it is taxing the same dollar for the third, fourth or fifth time. That is not reform. That is state-sanctioned deathbed banditry.
At heart, though, inheritance taxes are nothing more than naked, greedy, envy. The same people who call you ‘privileged’ because you had two parents who stayed together and even, horror of white privilege horrors, read books to you as a child, are simply seething with envy that your forebears worked hard, saved their money, and invested wisely.
The reformers imagine torrents of unearned wealth pouring into the laps of idle trust-fund brats. But the reality is that most inheritances go to middle-aged children, many still paying mortgages, staring down retirement. They are not lounging on yachts. They are nurses, small business owners, or teachers who have worked and paid taxes their entire lives. These are the people the reformers want to punish for the crime of having parents who saved instead of spent […]
Reformers call inheritance recipients lucky. Sure. As lucky as anyone born to a family that worked, saved, and built something. Parents do not accumulate assets out of greed. They do it because they want to care for their children, even after they are gone. That instinct, to look beyond one’s own lifespan, is one of the few forces that reliably binds generations together.
And that, I suspect is what really grinds the leftist gears. From the Soviet ‘New Man’ to the Queer Theorists’ ‘New Trans’, the end goal since Marx has been to destroy the family that stands so obviously in the way of their socialist utopia. If we care more about our families than about the state, then where will the totalitarians be?
The crusade for death taxes is not about fairness. It is about control. And it is always easier to demand sacrifice when you are not the one making it.
And this is always the way with envious, hateful Marxists: it’s never their money they spend.
There is no law stopping anyone from donating their estate to the state. The option exists. The forms are available. Yet somehow, the policy ‘experts’ championing death taxes never seem to tick that box themselves. Funny, that.
They are awfully generous with other people’s money. Passionate about redistribution, so long as it is not their wealth being redistributed. They will write op-eds about equality and fair shares of tax all the while living comfortable taxpayer-funded offices lives while structuring their own affairs to minimise every dollar owed.
It is never them who should pay more. Always someone else. Preferably someone who cannot argue back because they are dead.
If these experts truly believed the state deserves a cut of every estate, they would lead by example. They would pledge their own inheritances. Set up trusts payable to Treasury. Make the grand gesture. But they will not.
For the same reason wealthy leftists who prattle that, ‘Oh, I’d happily pay more tax’ never actually do. There is, after all, a perfectly straightforward method to pay extra revenue to the government. Somehow, though, Tarquin and Cressida from Grey Lynn just never get around to it. No more than they curtail their regular overseas holidays for the sake of the planet.
