Andy,
After years of writing about the super-rich, I would agree with Joseph Thorndike Jr.’s conclusion in his 1976 coffee table book, The Very Rich, “Great wealth may give its possessors a more than normal opportunity to become either happy or unhappy, depending on their own natures.” The same applies to Noah’s question about the merits of inherited wealth. The estate tax may deprive children of their parents’ assets or property, but I would argue that the most valuable assets parents can bequeath to their children are a good education and a strong sense of self-esteem. The money they inherit is largely irrelevant. I think most parents agree at some level: That’s why there’s such a disproportionately high demand for places in America’s 50 most selective colleges.
What fascinates me about this estate tax debate is how all sides validly lay claim to the “fairness” issue. One camp says fairness demands that people be allowed to keep and bequeath money on which they’ve already paid income taxes. Another camp asks what could be fairer and more painless than taxing society’s richest members after they die? Then there are people like Philadelphia’s own quintessential patrician inheritor Robert Montgomery Scott. (His mother, as you know, was the model for the wealthy socialite played by Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story.) Scott recently declared his opposition to estate tax repeal, arguing that the nation has a stake in his wealth “because the wealth wouldn’t exist without the nation.”
Obviously there is no clear right or wrong on this issue. But Scott raises a point that strikes me as widely overlooked. When times are bad, everyone blames the government. When times are good, everyone claims the credit for themselves. I think Joe Lieberman blew a good opportunity to drive that point home during his vice presidential debate with Dick Cheney last fall. Lieberman mentioned that all Americans had prospered during the Clinton years–especially Cheney, who’d just received a $20 million severance package from Halliburton. Cheney replied good-naturedly, “I can assure you the government had nothing to do with that.” If I were Lieberman, I would have replied, “If you think the government had nothing to do with Halliburton’s success or with your having been hired there, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.” Such a riposte might have shifted the necessary 200 or 300 votes in Florida, don’t you think?
Dan
