It seems worth remembering that young people will also inherit all their assets. (That is, whatever they didn't spend already.) That's a highly uneven inheritance, though. Also, all that debt is...
It seems worth remembering that young people will also inherit all their assets. (That is, whatever they didn't spend already.) That's a highly uneven inheritance, though.
Also, all that debt is someone else's investments. These interconnected obligations make it a bit hard to figure out what's really going on society-wide, and articles like this one don't really get into it.
On an individual level, none of that matters - you probably have a better idea where you stand than you can get out of an article about macroeconomic trends, which is mostly about other people.
I've read about a fair number of boomers putting reverse mortgages on their homes without thinking about what that means for their kids. There's a decent possibility that a lot of boomer wealth...
That is, whatever they didn't spend already.
I've read about a fair number of boomers putting reverse mortgages on their homes without thinking about what that means for their kids. There's a decent possibility that a lot of boomer wealth just goes 'poof' into bank coffers at the end of the day. I'm sure the private equity firms snapping up single-family homes are gonna have a field day buying those in auctions that aren't really visible to the general public.
And that's a huge problem, because for most Americans, the house is pretty much the only source of generational wealth.
Also, it's a small comfort that I might become a millionaire in my late 60's when my parents finally die in their 90s after struggling in their wake my entire working life. Well, not me personally, because I think I got written out of the will when I cut my parents off, but my siblings and peers in this same boat.
At least my kids will have it better...well other than having to deal with the dead and dying planet which the boomers had the largest political voice in damaging, as well as the biggest voice in trying to prevent fixing it.
This happened to my grandparents. When my grandfather died, they had to sell the house because they had a reverse mortgage. My mother and father were both boomers, but neither had a house when...
This happened to my grandparents. When my grandfather died, they had to sell the house because they had a reverse mortgage.
My mother and father were both boomers, but neither had a house when they died because of the ways they lived. I did not get an inheritance from either of them, but I also didn't have any debts from them, partly because I live in a different state from them.
Somewhat ironically, the only person I did receive an inheritance from was my grandmother, who had no house but had a nice nest egg that she spent responsibly in her retirement. It wasn't much, in the scheme of things, but it was a pretty big amount to me personally.
Personal debt does not transfer on death, other than being deducted from an estate...unless your name was attached to the debt as a responsible party. If your parents were $10 million in the hole,...
Personal debt does not transfer on death, other than being deducted from an estate...unless your name was attached to the debt as a responsible party. If your parents were $10 million in the hole, you won't be on the hook for that regardless.
My parent's bringing about the neoliberal hellscape and accompanying national debt in the USA courtesy of Reagan, Bush 2, and Trump however will remain forever.
An important note is that they do transfer as soon as you agree to pay any part of the debt, even a penny. Some companies will prey on people after their family members die. Things like “pay us a...
An important note is that they do transfer as soon as you agree to pay any part of the debt, even a penny. Some companies will prey on people after their family members die. Things like “pay us a few dollars right now, and we can reduce your parents debt and get your set up on a payment plan”. Always say no.
Very good point. Pro tip, even outside the context of estates: Never talk to debt collectors on the phone. Hang up immediately. They can send mail, and remember that they'll do their damndest to...
Very good point. Pro tip, even outside the context of estates: Never talk to debt collectors on the phone. Hang up immediately. They can send mail, and remember that they'll do their damndest to obfuscate and lie about your rights. If your name isn't on the debt, you don't owe it. Even if your name is on it, if it's from a debt collector and not the original issuer, there's a decent chance they fucked up and are trying to collect a debt that was already paid.
If you don't ever reply, there is a statute of limitations on all debt without collateral. While this is possible to abuse, don't feel too bad if you need to because the entire debt industry spends an awful lot of time abusing poor people for maximum benefit. They make more money from people with bad credit making several payments on 25%+ interest than all the good debtors who always pay on time and never incur interest or have cheap car loans or mortgages.
I very much see ignoring debt as a Robinhood-esq crime, but with even less direct harm.
Banks have no direct use for houses and neither do private equity firms, so even after a reverse mortgage, someone younger is going to live in that house, one way or another. The question is what...
Banks have no direct use for houses and neither do private equity firms, so even after a reverse mortgage, someone younger is going to live in that house, one way or another. The question is what the terms are.
(That is, assuming it’s in a desirable area and isn’t abandoned, like sometimes happens in severely depressed areas. But between the houses that cost too much and those that nobody wants at all, it seems like there ought to be a middle ground?)
I was referring to this bit Market share does imply "they already own 15%" Also, that was just this quarter, there's 3 more to go! There was also that time in the wake of the 2008 banking crisis...
I was referring to this bit
If that were true, their market share in the United States wouldn’t be a piddling 15 percent
Market share does imply "they already own 15%" Also, that was just this quarter, there's 3 more to go! There was also that time in the wake of the 2008 banking crisis they were snapping up 90%. They're often not looking for fairly priced houses, they're looking for maxium 'purchase to rent' value with minimal investment in repairs. You know, slumlords. So they're a bit choosy like that.
But either way it addresses my primary reason for bringing it up: Private equity firms do have a vested interest in snapping up housing, refuting what skybrian said about them not having a direct interest.
This is an opinion piece from Slate though and since the numbers are the same, I almost wonder if they just conflated the two. That said, it's not unbelievable either.
This is an opinion piece from Slate though and since the numbers are the same, I almost wonder if they just conflated the two. That said, it's not unbelievable either.
I pondered that a bit too when replying, and ultimately decided it didn't matter too much for the context in question. 15% of the homes in the first quarter is still too damn many homes.
I pondered that a bit too when replying, and ultimately decided it didn't matter too much for the context in question.
15% of the homes in the first quarter is still too damn many homes.
I hope they purchased 15% of the homes at a premium and then end up losing money on it. That would be a good way to transfer wealth from the haves to the have nots.
I hope they purchased 15% of the homes at a premium and then end up losing money on it. That would be a good way to transfer wealth from the haves to the have nots.
That mental excersize I did in the one thread to rebase currency really gave me perspective on the haves and have-nots. Turns out people are bad at math when numbers get huge and can't relate to...
That mental excersize I did in the one thread to rebase currency really gave me perspective on the haves and have-nots. Turns out people are bad at math when numbers get huge and can't relate to them.
To get that wealth inequality wrapped in my head even better, reduce inflation by dividing by 10,000 instead of 100 in the 'coins useful' case. So $0.01 now has the buying power of $100. The average home now costs less than $50. The average household pulls in $12 or less a year, with the average household wealth around that $40-50.
The rich person with $25,000,000 now has $2,500. The rich person with a billion now has $100,000. Otherwise known as 'enough assets to have a full 5-doctor rotation (paid $200,000 in our money) at your side 24/7 for 1000 years.'
At this point, I'm fully of the mind that everyone with over $30 million in assets needs to be stripped down to that level. In the case of one of the top 15 who have $100 billion or more that's 99.997% of their assets. That's a percentage that's used to measure downtime, to the tune of about 15 minutes of outage per year, which best I can tell AWS has never achieved.
We gonna need more than some light down-market exploits.
Edit: Thanks @ThrowdoBaggins for pointing out my math errors.
In that top example, you’re moving numbers by four orders of magnitude. So I think you’re saying the average home costs less than half a million? But in the second section when you’re talking...
instead of 100 in the 'coins useful' case. So $0.01 now has the buying power of $100. The average home now costs less than $50. The average household pulls in $12 or less a year, with the average household wealth around that $40-50.
The rich person with $25,000,000 now has $250. The rich person with a billion now has $10,000.
In that top example, you’re moving numbers by four orders of magnitude. So I think you’re saying the average home costs less than half a million?
But in the second section when you’re talking about rich people, you’re too generous — the person with $25 million should now have $2,500 not $250 that you stated here. Likewise, the billionaire has $100,000.
So the person with $25 million has as much accumulated wealth as fifty times the average household. And the just-barely-a-billionaire has wealth equal to forty times the rich multimillionaire!
Median home sale price in USA sits around $415k, and this is after the 2021 inflation crisis. Before it was sitting closer to $300k. Once you get out of high CoL areas homes get much more...
Median home sale price in USA sits around $415k, and this is after the 2021 inflation crisis. Before it was sitting closer to $300k.
Once you get out of high CoL areas homes get much more reasonable in cost. Still not great, but not impossible.
Yes, you are correct that I fubared my math pre-coffee. I'll fix, and also finished my one thought that got lost on a phone edit.
I believe that's just referring back to the previous 15% statistic. Here are statistics showing that total housing units in the US is 146 million. (Compare with a total population of 330 million,...
I believe that's just referring back to the previous 15% statistic.
Here are statistics showing that total housing units in the US is 146 million. (Compare with a total population of 330 million, which works out to 2.2 people per unit.) Zillow claims the total market is worth $52 trillion, which is about $340k per unit, though that's mixing together studio apartments and mansions, so the average is just an average.
From the article:
According to a recent SEC disclosure, Invitation Homes’ portfolio of homes is worth of total of $16 billion (after renovations), and the company collects about $1.9 billion in rent per year
That's a big number, but not compared to $50 trillion. It's easy to forget how big the US is.
Most houses aren't for sale, so even buying 15% of the market, it would take a very long time to make a dent in the total housing supply. Also, these firms would need to pay for all that housing by buying it, which would mean a lot more money going to private homeowners. And where would that money go? Invested in stocks?
Absolutely not lol. It gets extracted from the middle class by (among other things) a predatory healthcare system designed to reduce any remaining estate to zero. And I'm middle class myself, but...
Invested in stocks?
Absolutely not lol. It gets extracted from the middle class by (among other things) a predatory healthcare system designed to reduce any remaining estate to zero.
And I'm middle class myself, but forget the middle class for a moment – what about people less fortunate? They're just fucked from day one no matter what they do.
Much of the money spent on healthcare becomes income for the people who work in healthcare. So that’s another way wealth gets transferred to younger people, via labor costs.
Much of the money spent on healthcare becomes income for the people who work in healthcare. So that’s another way wealth gets transferred to younger people, via labor costs.
Not a good example as the healthcare system is full of immoral leeches at every turn making it harder for everyone to do their jobs and get the care they need. Namely the people benefitting the...
Not a good example as the healthcare system is full of immoral leeches at every turn making it harder for everyone to do their jobs and get the care they need.
Namely the people benefitting the most from this wealth transfer are the ones least deserving of it. The nurses are underpaid and won't get a cut and the doctors don't really need more. Most of the money will go to the middlemen or the owners of the companies who also are already millionaires.
However collecting all the estates means collecting more taxes to pay teachers and firefighters better and provide better health services for free, which can't be done when the wealth all exchanges via private coffers.
Oh and most medical debt has already been written off by the original issuer of that debt, auctioned off for pennies on the dollar, and then snapped up by other leeches hoping for a payday.
Holy fucking shit lol. I'm willing to lose my account for this. I know not everyone works in healthcare, but jesus fucking christ. This country has been destroyed. Edit: Just to be clear, the...
Much of the money spent on healthcare becomes income for the people who work in healthcare. So that’s another way wealth gets transferred to younger people, via labor costs.
Holy fucking shit lol. I'm willing to lose my account for this. I know not everyone works in healthcare, but jesus fucking christ. This country has been destroyed.
Edit: Just to be clear, the parent comment is SPECTACULARLY wrong. Healthcare workers don't get paid shit. The only wealth movement in the US is upwards.
This article has a point, that selfish decisions made today will affect people in the future. I guess it's advocating from removing senior discounts because older people are doing better than...
This article has a point, that selfish decisions made today will affect people in the future. I guess it's advocating from removing senior discounts because older people are doing better than younger people. But the truth is that the vast majority of people, regardless of generation, are victims of the selfish few, the sociopaths at the top that are hoarding most of the wealth and still want more.
Frankly, I'm quite tired of hearing about generations. Knowing that someone is "boomer" or "gen x" or "millennial" doesn't tell you anything about them. It's as useless as knowing what is their astrological sign or their Chinese zodiac sign.
If someone thinks that boomers are uniquely dumb or selfish, they should check out how many young people listen to what Musk or Andrew Tate or Joe Rogan have to say.
I often wonder if eliminating inheritance entirely wouldn't make the world a better place. On an individual level, there's nothing much stronger as the impulse to make sure your kids are...
I often wonder if eliminating inheritance entirely wouldn't make the world a better place.
On an individual level, there's nothing much stronger as the impulse to make sure your kids are successful, but being able to transfer massive amounts of generational wealth seems to do little more than create echos of lasting inequality through centuries or more. There are old European families who have had close to a millennia of wealth without having to work for any of it. That's dozens of hundreds of people that have never had to work a day in their lives, contribute nothing to society, and consume an ridiculous amount of resources simply because their parents were wealthy. It doesn't seem either fair, or desirable on a societal level.
I always wonder if absent the possibility of outright monetary transfer or nepotism, parents would be forced to think of other, more creative ways to ensure their children are happy and successful; say, like focusing on making them better people.
But then what happens to all their assets and wealth when they die? If someone started a business from scratch and poured everything they had into it over decades and it became a successful...
But then what happens to all their assets and wealth when they die?
If someone started a business from scratch and poured everything they had into it over decades and it became a successful business, they would likely rather pass that to their kids instead of seeing it in the hands of some greedy corporation who will ruin everything they spent their life building.
I've seen this happen. There was a guy in my hometown who ran a tire shop for decades. He gave amazing deals and free rotations if you bought tires from him. He built an amazing reputation around town to the point where everyone went to him. Everytime I went I had to get there half an hour before they opened or be stuck in line behind 15 people and spend 2-3 hours waiting. He was super popular and ran a tight ship.
Eventually he retired as he got older and sold his business to Big O Tires and they claimed they would honor the deals and free rotations and everything. Well within a year it was all gone, the reputation and good will vanished with the corporate bullshit and people stopped going. I stopped going, everyone I knew stopped going, with a few rare exceptions. It became just another Big O Tires. Everything the guy put into that business and reputation over all those decades and literal generations was gone almost instantly. That's pretty depressing.
Something was lost, but something remains. The building is still there, the business is still in business even if it’s a franchise now, it still serves the community by selling tires (hopefully),...
Something was lost, but something remains. The building is still there, the business is still in business even if it’s a franchise now, it still serves the community by selling tires (hopefully), and so it’s a financial asset to someone even if it’s not particularly special. If it’s sold again, maybe the new owner could make it more interesting? (Not too likely, but possible.)
Maybe we could compare a house to a home? After a family moves out and most of their personal touches removed in the process of “staging” it for the next buyer, a house is just a house and all you have are the photos and memories you take with you. Financially, though, it’s probably held its value?
The people who get our stuff after we leave might not know us, but they’ll still benefit from having our stuff.
(Contrast with all the junk that gets sent to the landfill after someone dies. That’s stuff that didn’t hold its value and nobody wants.)
I think it would be reasonable to leave some degree of inherintance. But I do think it should be heavily regulated, with limits much lower than currently. Transfers between spouses should be able...
I think it would be reasonable to leave some degree of inherintance. But I do think it should be heavily regulated, with limits much lower than currently. Transfers between spouses should be able to happen with minimal interference given the whole 'marital assets thing.' But passing down generationally is definitely a bit of a problem.
Essentially I think the things that are reasonable to pass down:
A single family home
A 100% family owned and operated business.
$100,000 per child of deceased
The key caveats:
The single family home should subject to a transfer tax equivalent to 10% of the total insured replacement value of it (IE to inherit house worth $600k to rebuild, $60k tax levied), possibly waived/reduced if there is still a lien on it.
The business itself, provided only the family works there. If there are other employees, it should be converted to a co-op with shares distributed proportional to the tenure of the employees who have worked there at least one year up to within say 2 years of the death (to avoid "fire everybody grandpa is dying" exploits) This allows a fairer distribution than letting some big corp or rando nepobaby from taking it over.
The raw cash is paid out of a universal life insurance policy for everyone. Enough money that if a sole-income earner for a household dies can keep everyone afloat while their lives are in turmoil. This is funded by most other assets being either heavily taxed (ie valuables) or seized (raw cash), again with a possible one-time exception for spouses losing their partner.
In essence we flatten out inherintance to insure everybody gets an equal share when their parent kicks the bucket.
It seems worth remembering that young people will also inherit all their assets. (That is, whatever they didn't spend already.) That's a highly uneven inheritance, though.
Also, all that debt is someone else's investments. These interconnected obligations make it a bit hard to figure out what's really going on society-wide, and articles like this one don't really get into it.
On an individual level, none of that matters - you probably have a better idea where you stand than you can get out of an article about macroeconomic trends, which is mostly about other people.
I've read about a fair number of boomers putting reverse mortgages on their homes without thinking about what that means for their kids. There's a decent possibility that a lot of boomer wealth just goes 'poof' into bank coffers at the end of the day. I'm sure the private equity firms snapping up single-family homes are gonna have a field day buying those in auctions that aren't really visible to the general public.
And that's a huge problem, because for most Americans, the house is pretty much the only source of generational wealth.
Also, it's a small comfort that I might become a millionaire in my late 60's when my parents finally die in their 90s after struggling in their wake my entire working life. Well, not me personally, because I think I got written out of the will when I cut my parents off, but my siblings and peers in this same boat.
At least my kids will have it better...well other than having to deal with the dead and dying planet which the boomers had the largest political voice in damaging, as well as the biggest voice in trying to prevent fixing it.
This happened to my grandparents. When my grandfather died, they had to sell the house because they had a reverse mortgage.
My mother and father were both boomers, but neither had a house when they died because of the ways they lived. I did not get an inheritance from either of them, but I also didn't have any debts from them, partly because I live in a different state from them.
Somewhat ironically, the only person I did receive an inheritance from was my grandmother, who had no house but had a nice nest egg that she spent responsibly in her retirement. It wasn't much, in the scheme of things, but it was a pretty big amount to me personally.
Personal debt does not transfer on death, other than being deducted from an estate...unless your name was attached to the debt as a responsible party. If your parents were $10 million in the hole, you won't be on the hook for that regardless.
My parent's bringing about the neoliberal hellscape and accompanying national debt in the USA courtesy of Reagan, Bush 2, and Trump however will remain forever.
An important note is that they do transfer as soon as you agree to pay any part of the debt, even a penny. Some companies will prey on people after their family members die. Things like “pay us a few dollars right now, and we can reduce your parents debt and get your set up on a payment plan”. Always say no.
Very good point. Pro tip, even outside the context of estates: Never talk to debt collectors on the phone. Hang up immediately. They can send mail, and remember that they'll do their damndest to obfuscate and lie about your rights. If your name isn't on the debt, you don't owe it. Even if your name is on it, if it's from a debt collector and not the original issuer, there's a decent chance they fucked up and are trying to collect a debt that was already paid.
If you don't ever reply, there is a statute of limitations on all debt without collateral. While this is possible to abuse, don't feel too bad if you need to because the entire debt industry spends an awful lot of time abusing poor people for maximum benefit. They make more money from people with bad credit making several payments on 25%+ interest than all the good debtors who always pay on time and never incur interest or have cheap car loans or mortgages.
I very much see ignoring debt as a Robinhood-esq crime, but with even less direct harm.
Banks have no direct use for houses and neither do private equity firms, so even after a reverse mortgage, someone younger is going to live in that house, one way or another. The question is what the terms are.
(That is, assuming it’s in a desirable area and isn’t abandoned, like sometimes happens in severely depressed areas. But between the houses that cost too much and those that nobody wants at all, it seems like there ought to be a middle ground?)
Did you miss how they own 15% of the housing stock? They're the next-generation slumlords.
Not exactly the same thing.
I was referring to this bit
Market share does imply "they already own 15%" Also, that was just this quarter, there's 3 more to go! There was also that time in the wake of the 2008 banking crisis they were snapping up 90%. They're often not looking for fairly priced houses, they're looking for maxium 'purchase to rent' value with minimal investment in repairs. You know, slumlords. So they're a bit choosy like that.
But either way it addresses my primary reason for bringing it up: Private equity firms do have a vested interest in snapping up housing, refuting what skybrian said about them not having a direct interest.
This is an opinion piece from Slate though and since the numbers are the same, I almost wonder if they just conflated the two. That said, it's not unbelievable either.
I pondered that a bit too when replying, and ultimately decided it didn't matter too much for the context in question.
15% of the homes in the first quarter is still too damn many homes.
I hope they purchased 15% of the homes at a premium and then end up losing money on it. That would be a good way to transfer wealth from the haves to the have nots.
That mental excersize I did in the one thread to rebase currency really gave me perspective on the haves and have-nots. Turns out people are bad at math when numbers get huge and can't relate to them.
To get that wealth inequality wrapped in my head even better, reduce inflation by dividing by 10,000 instead of 100 in the 'coins useful' case. So $0.01 now has the buying power of $100. The average home now costs less than $50. The average household pulls in $12 or less a year, with the average household wealth around that $40-50.
The rich person with $25,000,000 now has $2,500. The rich person with a billion now has $100,000. Otherwise known as 'enough assets to have a full 5-doctor rotation (paid $200,000 in our money) at your side 24/7 for 1000 years.'
At this point, I'm fully of the mind that everyone with over $30 million in assets needs to be stripped down to that level. In the case of one of the top 15 who have $100 billion or more that's 99.997% of their assets. That's a percentage that's used to measure downtime, to the tune of about 15 minutes of outage per year, which best I can tell AWS has never achieved.
We gonna need more than some light down-market exploits.
Edit: Thanks @ThrowdoBaggins for pointing out my math errors.
In that top example, you’re moving numbers by four orders of magnitude. So I think you’re saying the average home costs less than half a million?
But in the second section when you’re talking about rich people, you’re too generous — the person with $25 million should now have $2,500 not $250 that you stated here. Likewise, the billionaire has $100,000.
So the person with $25 million has as much accumulated wealth as fifty times the average household. And the just-barely-a-billionaire has wealth equal to forty times the rich multimillionaire!
Median home sale price in USA sits around $415k, and this is after the 2021 inflation crisis. Before it was sitting closer to $300k.
Once you get out of high CoL areas homes get much more reasonable in cost. Still not great, but not impossible.
Yes, you are correct that I fubared my math pre-coffee. I'll fix, and also finished my one thought that got lost on a phone edit.
I believe that's just referring back to the previous 15% statistic.
Here are statistics showing that total housing units in the US is 146 million. (Compare with a total population of 330 million, which works out to 2.2 people per unit.) Zillow claims the total market is worth $52 trillion, which is about $340k per unit, though that's mixing together studio apartments and mansions, so the average is just an average.
From the article:
That's a big number, but not compared to $50 trillion. It's easy to forget how big the US is.
Most houses aren't for sale, so even buying 15% of the market, it would take a very long time to make a dent in the total housing supply. Also, these firms would need to pay for all that housing by buying it, which would mean a lot more money going to private homeowners. And where would that money go? Invested in stocks?
Absolutely not lol. It gets extracted from the middle class by (among other things) a predatory healthcare system designed to reduce any remaining estate to zero.
And I'm middle class myself, but forget the middle class for a moment – what about people less fortunate? They're just fucked from day one no matter what they do.
Much of the money spent on healthcare becomes income for the people who work in healthcare. So that’s another way wealth gets transferred to younger people, via labor costs.
Not a good example as the healthcare system is full of immoral leeches at every turn making it harder for everyone to do their jobs and get the care they need.
Namely the people benefitting the most from this wealth transfer are the ones least deserving of it. The nurses are underpaid and won't get a cut and the doctors don't really need more. Most of the money will go to the middlemen or the owners of the companies who also are already millionaires.
However collecting all the estates means collecting more taxes to pay teachers and firefighters better and provide better health services for free, which can't be done when the wealth all exchanges via private coffers.
Oh and most medical debt has already been written off by the original issuer of that debt, auctioned off for pennies on the dollar, and then snapped up by other leeches hoping for a payday.
Holy fucking shit lol. I'm willing to lose my account for this. I know not everyone works in healthcare, but jesus fucking christ. This country has been destroyed.
Edit: Just to be clear, the parent comment is SPECTACULARLY wrong. Healthcare workers don't get paid shit. The only wealth movement in the US is upwards.
This article has a point, that selfish decisions made today will affect people in the future. I guess it's advocating from removing senior discounts because older people are doing better than younger people. But the truth is that the vast majority of people, regardless of generation, are victims of the selfish few, the sociopaths at the top that are hoarding most of the wealth and still want more.
Frankly, I'm quite tired of hearing about generations. Knowing that someone is "boomer" or "gen x" or "millennial" doesn't tell you anything about them. It's as useless as knowing what is their astrological sign or their Chinese zodiac sign.
If someone thinks that boomers are uniquely dumb or selfish, they should check out how many young people listen to what Musk or Andrew Tate or Joe Rogan have to say.
I often wonder if eliminating inheritance entirely wouldn't make the world a better place.
On an individual level, there's nothing much stronger as the impulse to make sure your kids are successful, but being able to transfer massive amounts of generational wealth seems to do little more than create echos of lasting inequality through centuries or more. There are old European families who have had close to a millennia of wealth without having to work for any of it. That's dozens of hundreds of people that have never had to work a day in their lives, contribute nothing to society, and consume an ridiculous amount of resources simply because their parents were wealthy. It doesn't seem either fair, or desirable on a societal level.
I always wonder if absent the possibility of outright monetary transfer or nepotism, parents would be forced to think of other, more creative ways to ensure their children are happy and successful; say, like focusing on making them better people.
But then what happens to all their assets and wealth when they die?
If someone started a business from scratch and poured everything they had into it over decades and it became a successful business, they would likely rather pass that to their kids instead of seeing it in the hands of some greedy corporation who will ruin everything they spent their life building.
I've seen this happen. There was a guy in my hometown who ran a tire shop for decades. He gave amazing deals and free rotations if you bought tires from him. He built an amazing reputation around town to the point where everyone went to him. Everytime I went I had to get there half an hour before they opened or be stuck in line behind 15 people and spend 2-3 hours waiting. He was super popular and ran a tight ship.
Eventually he retired as he got older and sold his business to Big O Tires and they claimed they would honor the deals and free rotations and everything. Well within a year it was all gone, the reputation and good will vanished with the corporate bullshit and people stopped going. I stopped going, everyone I knew stopped going, with a few rare exceptions. It became just another Big O Tires. Everything the guy put into that business and reputation over all those decades and literal generations was gone almost instantly. That's pretty depressing.
Something was lost, but something remains. The building is still there, the business is still in business even if it’s a franchise now, it still serves the community by selling tires (hopefully), and so it’s a financial asset to someone even if it’s not particularly special. If it’s sold again, maybe the new owner could make it more interesting? (Not too likely, but possible.)
Maybe we could compare a house to a home? After a family moves out and most of their personal touches removed in the process of “staging” it for the next buyer, a house is just a house and all you have are the photos and memories you take with you. Financially, though, it’s probably held its value?
The people who get our stuff after we leave might not know us, but they’ll still benefit from having our stuff.
(Contrast with all the junk that gets sent to the landfill after someone dies. That’s stuff that didn’t hold its value and nobody wants.)
I think it would be reasonable to leave some degree of inherintance. But I do think it should be heavily regulated, with limits much lower than currently. Transfers between spouses should be able to happen with minimal interference given the whole 'marital assets thing.' But passing down generationally is definitely a bit of a problem.
Essentially I think the things that are reasonable to pass down:
The key caveats:
The single family home should subject to a transfer tax equivalent to 10% of the total insured replacement value of it (IE to inherit house worth $600k to rebuild, $60k tax levied), possibly waived/reduced if there is still a lien on it.
The business itself, provided only the family works there. If there are other employees, it should be converted to a co-op with shares distributed proportional to the tenure of the employees who have worked there at least one year up to within say 2 years of the death (to avoid "fire everybody grandpa is dying" exploits) This allows a fairer distribution than letting some big corp or rando nepobaby from taking it over.
The raw cash is paid out of a universal life insurance policy for everyone. Enough money that if a sole-income earner for a household dies can keep everyone afloat while their lives are in turmoil. This is funded by most other assets being either heavily taxed (ie valuables) or seized (raw cash), again with a possible one-time exception for spouses losing their partner.
In essence we flatten out inherintance to insure everybody gets an equal share when their parent kicks the bucket.