The estate tax

[RandomThoughts]

I was thinking about the estate tax and inherited wealth at the last poker game I was at. This is what came to mind.

10 people sit down at the poker tournament. 9 are given 100 in chips. 1 is given 10,000 chips. After a pause, one guy at the table asked the dealer, "um, I think there is something wrong here?"

The dealer seeing the discrepancy tells the 10 people at the table, if you vote on it you can choose to correct the unequal distribution.

After hearing this, the guy with 10,000 chips quickly slips the dealer 500 chips as a tip and whispers something. Immediately she starts to explain how the guy with 10,000 earned those chips because his grandfather won a tournament a couple decades ago, so he gets to start with more, and it is completely correct and fair.

The other 9 players looking dumbfounded, blink at the first deal, and the guys first bet of 90 chips.

Does this sound familiar to anyone else out there?

[pokerfan]

1. Yes, it does

We had to sell land to cover tax debt when our mother died. Farming is a low margin business but they seem to want to tax you on total revenue.

I don't remember our mother slipping the dealer any chips.

[RandomThoughts]

2. in the analogy your mother only had 300 chips

not 10,000. The slipping of the chips could be seen as donations to political entities that set the agenda of the person making the rules.

I understand both sides of that issue, the right for a family to pass down its material legacy, especially when it is a home or farm, could be mitigated by a progressive system. But if the property was worth really alot, a middle ground tax on the property really makes sense. Even if that means a shrinking of some family farms.

However, this would also include assets like shares of stock in the big farming corporations.

It all comes down to what is ownership, and what is earned.

Sorry you had a tough time, both with the passing of your mother, and the tax debt.

[Name removed]

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[Name removed]

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[pokerfan]

7. I guess you win

The mods deleted the sub-thread.

Congratulations.

[Karl_Bonner_1982]

5. It goes more like this....

The guy with 10,000 chips came from a generation where the best-to-do had only 1,500-2,000 chips. Everyone got a raise every so often, and the percentage rates of raise were about the same across the distribution. But then in 1980, the guys with lots of chips found a way to rig the game so that their chips would increase rapidly while everyone else saw their chip count stay the same, even go down a bit at times, and become more uncertain and insecure from year to year. In order to cement the new order in place, they had to buy off not only the dealers but the people who wrote the poker rules in order to change attitudes toward what is considered fair. They also managed to use fear-mongering to successfully convince a portion of the poorer players that it is more important to blame each other for the problems than to blame the new rules of the game. They also convinced a significant portion of the more educated players that either the rules had not in fact changed, or that the change in the rules - and the resulting increase in inequality - was an inevitable necessity to keep the system running efficiently as its structure evolved over time. The inequality jump was caused because the more enlightened poker players had more of a comparative advantage over the uneducated ones than they did under the old, now-obsolete system. And any attempt to restore the relative distributive levels of the old order would cause the poker economy to collapse.

Through a combination of ruthless rigging of the rules, silencing the activists who traditionally spoke out against unfair chip distributions, buying off the dealers, and rewriting the poker rules to make the emerging new order seem either fair OR a necessary evil OR caused by inexorable evolutionary forces - through all these, the few elites have been able to get away with starting off with huge chip piles and rigging the rules in their favor.

[RandomThoughts]

6. I enjoyed your expansion of the analogy

I think most of it hinges on the 9 players just sitting back and watching it happen. Thats what amazes me. And is a darkside arguement for theft,

"if you can get away with it it is legal" I disagree with this arguement.