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The U.S. national debt reached $20 trillion for the first time ever last Friday after President Trump signed a bipartisan bill temporarily raising the nation's debt limit for three months.
While at Camp David, Mr. Trump, with the stroke of his presidential pen, increased the statutory debt last Friday by approximately $318 billion, according to the Treasury Department. Before the bill's completion, the U.S. debt was sitting around $19.84 trillion.
The legislation allowed the Treasury Department to start borrowing again immediately after several months of using "extraordinary measures" to avoid a financial default. The bill passed last Thursday 80-17 in the Senate and in the House 316-90 on Friday. Around $15 billion in emergency funding for Hurricane Harvey recovery efforts was attached to the borrowing measure.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/national-debt-hits-historic-20-trillion-mark/
[That works out to just shy of $62,000 per American. --Ed.]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ben_white on Friday September 15 2017, @03:29PM (5 children)
Inherited wealth adds no value to society, we should have significant estate taxes for the reasons you allude to. I like the analogy of playing Monopoly. A game of monopoly is over when one individual accumulates all of the assets. Imagine if the next game played, started with the winner's daughter starting with all of the assets her father accumulated in the previous game. Everyone else just gets to pass go and collect their salary. What chance do the other players have to accumulate any wealth of their own. We are rapidly moving toward this scenario in our economy.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2017, @04:18PM (4 children)
Monopoly is a zero-sum game.
As you say, once one player gets all of the resources, then that player wins; yet, in the real world, taking everybody else's resources is not at all how it works—in the real world, wealth is created; the pie is grown, not stolen ever more from others.
The real world is not a zero-sum game.
Your analogy is therefore completely wrong, and thus your conclusions for the real world are completely wrong.
Inheritance is just one one person appointing another person to be the custodian of resources; though not guaranteed, a son may well be the best replacement for his father, having grown up in close contact with the man who accumulated (and hopefully created) that wealth in the first place. The whole of society is better off when there is that kind of continuity between stewards of resources; society is not better off when know-nothing, vote buying, paper-pushing bureaucrats are just arbitrarily handed the life's work of a productive person (I mean, why should that one particular organization be the new custodian? WHY?)
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday September 15 2017, @05:24PM (1 child)
The real world is not a zero-sum game.
That's not true. Just like in Monopoly, where the resources that are zero-sum are the properties on the perimeter of the board, in the "real world", there's a finite amount of real estate. Everyone needs a place to live, so when all the real estate is bought up and the prices constantly inflated, you get exactly the scenario the OP describes with the last Monopoly game's winner keeping all the assets for the next game. In theory, this problem is alleviated by multiple factors, like property owners dying and their property being both taxed (inheritance taxes) and split up among their heirs, and new real estate being built (e.g., subdividing open land and building a new subdivision, or buying up some single-family housing and building a high-rise condo there), but we've gotten to the point now that cities just can't expand much more because transportation becomes infeasible (it's not worth it to live on the outskirts where it's affordable if it takes you 2 hours to commute to work because the traffic is so bad and it's so far away), and also because the property owners and zoning boards are refusing to allow new high-density construction (as we see in SanFran now).
The whole of society is better off when there is that kind of continuity between stewards of resources;
No, it's not, because wealth tends to accumulate and you end up with very wealthy families holding most of the nation's wealth. Honestly, your use of the word "stewards" makes you sound like a kool-aid drinking follower of Prosperity Doctrine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2017, @05:56PM
You've said nothing new, and you therefore haven't countered your parent.
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Friday September 15 2017, @05:54PM
This may or may not be true of a family business. It's almost certainly untrue of massive bank accounts. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates have limited their children's inheritance, probably so they don't turn out like Paris Hilton. Lineal succession has a long tradition, but its flaws are some of the most well-documented history on the planet.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 17 2017, @03:30PM
Ok, for each new game of monopoly, just add another board. The daughter of the winner just starts with a whole board full of property and a massive wad of cash. You start with nothing. Now you all fight it out on both boards. Who do you think will win? Next time when there's 3 boards and the next daughter owns the previous 2 your kids chances are even less.