re: #316 Obdicut

Interesting. I didn’t know Roosevelt was so strongly in favor of a large inheritance tax. It makes sense, given his sense of fair play. He wanted both taxes on wealth, in the form of the estate tax, and taxes on income.

He always was a pretty farsighted dude. He even notes that loopholes would be the largest problem with the inheritance tax.

The inheritance tax wasn’t really about gov’t revenue, that was just a bonus. The main point was to prevent the rise of a hereditary aristocracy.

Andrew Carnegie was also strongly in favor of an inheritance tax, but he believed it would be revenue-neutral to the gov’t. He wanted it so that people who’d earned great fortunes would be forced to spend it all on something useful before they died. (Libraries and university literature departments were Carnegie’s personal favorite thing, but I bet he’d be pretty impressed with Bill Gates using his money to eradicate malaria).