Would a very low income tax and a very high inheritance tax please everybody? [View all]

[Baobab]

adjust the world to the job-less future that's right around the corner. It would be paired by hard limits on pork spending and a policy that shared that wealth mostly with everybody who was born here but in part also tried to eliminate poverty and address illness. Also, taxes on polluters would be astronomical.

So, there would be hard and fast limits on how much could be passed on to children, and they would be an effective tax rate of >90% on inheritance over a certain amount.(picking an amount out thin air, maybe $10M. However during life, taxes on the wealthy would be basically fairly low like they are now and people who were not wealthy would pay no taxes, however people would be expected to do volunteer work - for example, teaching other people the skills they have if that is appropriate or in some cases, when it was of historical interest, putting down their life experience in some preservable form so it would not be lost. Also, people who wanted to could continue in education learning and teaching and doing research. A sizable amount of society's resources would be focused on research in academia.

There we would attempt to tackle areas of knowledge which needed more understanding. For example we would continue the attempt to figure out the problems of aging and death and to develop practical means of interplanetary and interstellar space travel. (NASA's budget would finally be increased!)

Necessities of life would be free including education, food and health care. Decent housing would be manufactured, warm, cozy and very affordable. Since nobody would need to work unless they actually wanted to do something interesting and positive with their lives, society would be a lot happier and more invested in things like pure science and learning of all kinds, especially engineering, medicine and the arts. Money would exist but be de-emphasized due to the very high inheritance taxes. Everybody would get the same health care, so there would be no gap between rich and poor in lifespans.

Robots would do most work and get better and better and eventually become intelligent like us and at the same time people would likely be incorporating lots of technology from them into our own bodies so the transition would be more natural. There would be laws against killer robots and drones and also warfare would be viewed as a crime against all humanity. Tolerance for all religions, races and species would be attempted and codified into law. One of our highest priorities would be preventing any more species extinctions both on land and in sea. Contraception would be universally available and because of the rising level of education its expected that people would not increase in population, that instead the population would stay around the same or fall slightly. (That's what is happening in well-educated developed countries if you ignore immigration.) The key feature is the elimination of concentration of wealth across generations.

If we don't do that we will soon have a society where a shrinking number of very wealthy own everything and everybody else owns less and less and finally, nothing.

This is because technology is increasing exponentially, the more we learn, the faster we learn more. So, for example, its totally ridiculous for politicians to pretend that people will be able to continue working much later in their careers as a response to fiscal pressures. With all things continuing as they are today, in 30 years or so most people will be unemployed and facing life without employment. While at the same time the concentration of wealth will make some families extremely wealthy, many more will starve of no fault of their own. Barring a very significant effort to raise the general level of education to far beyond where it is today, very few people will work - unless they excel in their fields, increasingly they simply wont be needed-so the argument that some people deserve more than others will become more and more questionable.

(I think that a push to obfuscate these facts are driving a lot of very bad policy today.)