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An older relative of mine died, and the mortgage was instantly paid off by the insurance he and the bank had contracted with the loan, so I was going off that. But in any case, the loan is also guaranteed by the house, and so the bank will give out such mortgages to the elderly, even if, as I recommend, people have no power after death.
I don't know where you're getting this from. The NGO should be taxed normally, they don't have to give back anything, what's done is done. When the man dies however, his assets should be heavily taxed before it reaches any NGO or heirs.
An echo is not equal to the original sound. The dead are not equal to the living. I respect your rights, partly because I'm nice, partly because you have the power to defend them. Unlike the dead. What could be more important than this distinction? And I'm not interested in being nice to inanimate objects.
I brought up the NGO as an example of someone exerting influence decades after their own death, something you have an issue with. The point was to demonstrate that really this has little to do with the actual moment of death--it's quite easy to set up the NGO while still alive. Creating an inheritance tax the way you have in mind will do nothing at all, because people can just give their money away soon before death. You'd just end up with everyone giving their assets to their children years ahead of time, then living in "their son's house" and subsisting off of "their son's retirement account" until death.
Sure, that's a problem I acknowledge. I'd have to tax live gifts to children, though the argument there is weaker than in the inheritance case.
But the state taxes you whatever you do: working, buying, owning a house, making capital gains etc (a lot of it is economically productive, and in theory entirely yours), so I never understand the 'double dipping' complaints, or how people get offended when a new tax is proposed: "But it's my money, I should be able to do whatever I want with it, and I want my kids to get it"
"Okay, but it was also your money when they took part of your salary, then when you bought something with it, and when your investments paid off, and the public media tax, and the car licence tax and so on.... it's not double dipping, it's infinite dipping, you're on a merry-go-round of taxes, so what's one more at this point?" .
And no matter what guys like @The_Nybbler think, not all discussion of taxes is some dishonest ploy by his blue enemies to raise taxes. I would like overall taxes and spending to be slashed, starting with the pensions and welfare. We should be able to discuss which taxes are better (obviously inheritance, wealth, property, tobacco, congestion, consumption, and speeding tickets) without the bad faith accusations.
You're setting yourself up for failure when you start these conversations by talking about whether dead people have any right to their assets at all. Sure, it's possible to discuss which taxes are best, but you've planted your flag way off in one extreme where the moment someone dies, their wishes become irrelevant, but only if their wishes involve what's best for their kids.
I've tried to make it clear why this doesn't make sense. Society in general is not structured this way. Changing how contracts work to make them void upon death is just idiotic. It violates the rights of living people to make decisions about their own futures. Furthermore, it's self-defeating, because people can easily get around the law in any number of ways.
I want to be able to buy a coffin, and pay for my own funeral, before I die. Whether you realize it or not, you're advocating for a society where this is impossible. Any contract I make that involves paying for a funeral is void upon my death--the company can just run off with my money.
We can talk about optimal tax structures but first you need to understand that you're just wrong about this. There's no point discussing whether the optimal inheritance tax is 1% or 100% with someone who still doesn't recognize it as a tax in the first place.
I'm not doing PR, you know. I often phrase my opinions in a deliberately provocative manner to poke the bear, encourage discussion and the questioning of assumptions. "We're living in a necrocracy, sheeple!".
Let's say you organized your funeral where there'd be a bonfire of priceless works of art, destroying hundreds of brand-new washing machines , slaughtering and burning 10,000 heads of cattle. I do find that a bit perverse.
Likewise, sometimes your organs can save another human - it should not be allowed to be buried with such treasures.
You would not make such a contract obviously. If your family and friends care about you, I'm sure they will organize something.
You're testing my patience here. This is perverse whether it's your funeral or some other party. As I've said like 3 times now, it has nothing to do with your death!
The same goes for inheritance taxes in general. You can talk about taxing them, but don't bring death into it, because it functionally makes no difference whether the money is inherited before or after death.
Or I could still do it myself in this bizarro world, but I'd have to go through a convoluted legal process to do so. For example, I could build a nonprofit with the sole stated goal of giving me a funeral, hire someone to run the nonprofit, and then give them enough money to pay for the funeral. Now they have an obligation, not to me, but to the nonprofit itself, to abide by its mission. I'm sure I could come up with a dozen different ways to accomplish the same thing.
If your opinion is actually that contracts with dead people should be voided, there's nothing "deliberately provocative" about that, you just don't understand contracts.
Disagree, it’s way worse when the sponsor’s a dead guy. And destroy value for the dead used to be a common cultural practice.
I’d close that loophole. I don’t like foundations controlled by a ‘dead hand’ anyway, especially if they have large assets. Harvard, the rockefeller foundation, churches etc, they don’t need all those assets, they need to be brutally taxed imo. As long as joe sixpack still has to pay some taxes, the state should go after those zombie assets first.
What examples of contracts that should not be voided by death, are you thinking of? Marriage and mortgage are , hum, liquidated. Insurance contracts, work contracts, are just cancelled. Wills would definitely be voided if the inheritance tax was 100%.
You wouldn't close that loophole, because you can't. Nobody else can either. Reality fundamentally involves making decisions and changes that propagate into the future, and it's physically impossible to prevent this.
That's why I brought up NGOs. Taking you at face value, it seems like you'd disband any NGOs founded by dead people, or force them to change their mission statements or something. Even if you do this you still haven't "closed the loophole". I can just as easily exert my influence by donating money to an NGO as by founding my own new NGO. It really doesn't make a difference whether I actually found the NGO myself, or just find one that exactly aligns with what I want (perhaps even paying someone under the table to create it). Maybe I even donate to an NGO dedicated to paying for people's funerals, and coincidentally they pay for mine.
As I said earlier:
What's the alternative? Confiscate the money from the NGO because the donor died soon after donating? Require that all organizations only make year-long plans, because nobody has the right to plan further in advance than that?
Literally every contract.
Remains in force to some extent, otherwise there's a big argument over who owns the assets when a spouse dies. The contract that gives him ownership of a business is subordinate to the marriage contract, which says that now that he's dead she gets the business.
Obviously remains in force or the bank doesn't get its money back, and old people can't get mortgages. Your whole idea in another thread of the bank retaining ownership of the house except for the equity built up by the owner is just inaccurate. The bank does not own the house at all at any stage in the loan.
Remain in force. Life insurance policies should be possible, after all. Health insurance is still obligated to pay for the guy's dying medical bills.
If your retort is "life insurance policies would be between third parties" then I respond that all other contracts can be like that too, and then we're back to square one, which is asking why you're so insistent on voiding these contracts in the first place.
Remain in force. His estate should still get paid for the last work he did, and if he has a pension, his estate gets that too. Putting aside ownership, there may be other stipulations in the contract, like ownership of intellectual property, or credit for big contributions, which should remain in force.
Wills generally involve financially insignificant things, too, like deciding who gets the dog. They remain in force even if the tax is 100%.
It should be legal to plan ahead. Contracts are just a legal formality giving additional strength and protection to the handshake. If you ban contracts, the handshake will still exist, and people will still go on making deals with each other that propagate into the future (including futures where they're dead) because this is human nature.
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Why does the bank get the house instead of the government via inheritance taxes?
They have the greater claim to the estate. A dead man is like a bankrupt company: first the creditors get paid. The state gets the leftover equity.
Why? Their contract was with a dead man, it should no longer be in force. Are only banks allowed to enter into these contracts that extend past the death of the counterparty, or could a living man make a contract with his children and have that take precedence over the state when he dies? Maybe we could call it something like a "will"?
The mortgaged house did not fully belong to the dead man when he was alive to begin with. Since he could not dispose of the mortgaged house as he pleased in life, he can't in death either.
The contract did not extend past the death, it ended: It said, paraphrasing: 'X will pay for 30 years and then gets the house. If X stops paying because of deadness for example, the house is sold and the proceeds shared according to the following formula:... , etc." .
No. I can't make a contract with you where we, for example, exchange goods, but both agree we won't pay the tax the state puts on such things.
If contracts with the dead really aren't valid, this wouldn't be true. If X stops paying because of deadness, there is no contract. The clause about selling the house and sharing the proceeds is part of the contract, so it's no longer valid. The bank just owns the house, period, they don't need to sell it or give away any of the proceeds if they don't want to.
That's fine. Although if we decide to go that way, I think this ownership transfer should be taxed also.
What ownership transfer? The bank has the house at the start. X dies before the house gets transfered to him, so the bank keeps the house. There's no transfer.
The transfer of the dead man's equity in the house that he originally got in exchange for his payments.
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