pull down to refresh
100 sats \ 0 replies \ @fourrules OP 8h \ parent \ on: Fixing demographic collapse: Tax Breaks for Grandparents, Not Parents econ
I want to create a proposal for a tax break for inheritance planning that is pronatalist.
Basically the more grandchildren you have, genetic or not, the greater your tax break.
A formal structure would be devised to allow high net worth individuals to take advantage of the scheme by adopting parents not genetically related to them, even if they already have children or even grandchildren, thereby spreading their wealth as widely as possible.
The problem of demographic collapse is in part caused by a misalignment between the interests of older people and the interests of young adults and their children. Elderly people need younger people to work more to fund pensions, but this means that younger people have less time and resources to have children, meaning the tax burdens on each generation increase, perpetuating the decrease in children being born.
I want to align the interests of the generations and creates intergenerational dependence. It would be a disaster if a lot of capital were locked up in the retirement savings of people without grandchildren, or even without children.
Help me pitch this, ask me questions about it first.
-
A combination of income tax break and CGT when an asset is disposed.
-
Linear probably, but this is a detail that could be worked out later
-
I don't literally mean adoption, but a formal and uniform model where assets are transferred to a trust in the name of the beneficiaries which the elderly person can access in an emergency, but if they take them out they trigger a claw back from the government of the income tax they didn't pay because they set up this vehicle for inheritance planning. The idea of 'adoption' is just an analogy to pitch the idea. The formal structure is the uniform model for reducing the legal overhead, to make it very clear what should happen to a person's estate after they pass, so it's not sufficient to simply change their will privately. A uniform structure that the tax man recognises removes all room for error and ambiguity.
-
It's aimed at anyone with assets who pays tax on their retirement income or who draws down their assets in retirement to fund their living expenses. If you own a home and have a state pension but you have no children then by organising your estate so that a family with children will inherit it you'll be given a tax break. This gives families whose parents do not have assets an opportunity to build a relationship with other elderly people in their community for mutual benefits. Some elderly people could disinherit their own children if they don't have children, and earn a tax break giving their wealth to people who do have children.
-
There is no minimum age that you can be a grandparent. Either you're a grandparent or not. The younger you are when you set this up or when your children have their own children the longer you can avail of the tax break for. But I think the grandchildren need to be under 18. You can't adopt your 70yo neighbour who had 11 children who are all adults now just to avail of the big tax break.
-
I'm trying to encourage a negotiation between elderly people and young parents around inheritance so that more people in child baring are have certainty about their financial future. Many elderly people are alone and it would be beneficial to them to have adoptive family. Many elderly people who do have grandchildren offer no tangible support to their children, and their children should be about to seek out a new grandparent relationship if they are familiar with a person who can benefit from the tax break. Good intergenerational relationships should be rewarded, where they are genetic or not. It takes a village to both raise a child and care for the elderly. Its very bad for society to have a narrow "inheritocracy" who benefit from increasing asset values even if they don't have any children. This policy would reduce inequality in future generations without directly increasing inheritance taxes. I don't want to increase intergenerational wealth transfer while grandparents are alive, necessarily, but grandparents that help parents with a deposit for a home are likely to benefit because their children will be able to have children sooner, so it encourages them to help out in financial and non-financial ways.
-
Finding families to 'adopt' is not necessarily part of the policy. It could be someone you know from work, or a neighbour. Young families would be encouraged to get to know elderly neighbours, as would the elderly without any grandchildren be encouraged to meet people around them. But no additional supports are required other than the financial incentive and guidance on the formal structure required for non-genetic inheritance to qualify for the tax break.
-
All 4 of your pitches are equally valid, I think it's important to pitch it in a different way depending upon the priorities and political biases of the audience.
"This is just a tax dodge for the rich"
We offer many tax breaks for behaviour we want to foster. Pensions are paid by the current work force, the entire pension system is built on demographic growth, or at least stability, it cannot rely on the productivity improvements of automation alone. The capital held by elderly people has to provide financial security for the widest possible number of working parents in order to increase the birth rate across the population.
"This commodifies children/families"
How is it different to child benefit? Do child benefit payments commodity children?
"This creates perverse incentives for fake relationships"
There is nothing fake about inheritance. Even if it's a purely financial arrangement it still spreads wealth out more widely and encourages birth rates. The real relationships it may foster are an ancillary benefit.
Another factor to consider: grandchildren not resident in the country are not counted. The policy can't be used to solve the demographic crisis in some other country. This encourages grandparents to say to their children that they should bring them home. Otherwise they could disinherit them and instead give their wealth to an immigrant family who have plenty of children.
- Sunset Clause for Gaming I don't understand what you're saying here. The surrogate grandparent still owns the assets, they can withdraw them from the trust at any time, but then they have to 'adopt' a new family with the same number of children or more to avoid the state clawing back the income taxes they would have paid. But they could also just 'adopt' another family, spreading their wealth out across a wider number of adoptive grandchildren. There is no reason why they have to choose only one family. If course this could be seen as a very manipulative thing to do, to potentially exploit people who support you in your old age only to adopt the whole neighborhood just before you pass away, but I don't think that should be assumed to be a real problem or common occurrence, as it wouldn't obviously benefit the elderly person in any way. I also don't think there is a need for bonuses, given that if you don't have more children the elderly person might be encouraged to 'adopt' another family.
Of course there could be a scam run where elderly parents who disinherit their own children re-introduce them into their inheritance plan at end of life, reducing the inheritance of an adopted family that were manipulated into supporting the elderly person. This, I can imagine it would be something that would need to be adjudicated by a formal system, but I think it can't be avoided. A similar scenario can easily be imagined between biological children, and in fact often occurs, where one child supports the parent but is not duly compensated the will compared to a child that has been estranged. Inheritance is messy, that's unavoidable.
I want to create a post on Stacker.news to get feedback, and then introduce it as an idea in a pronatalist political party that I have joined.
Shorter, punchier format than policy papers
The core incentive structure + Potential gaming/loopholes + Political feasibility + Implementation details
All of the above
Emphasize this as an obvious solution to demographic collapse, that tax breaks for parents is the wrong approach.
I don't think you need that kind of faith, I think you just have to have faith that a healthier more coordinated minority will dominate society. If you have poor digital hygiene you should bare the consequences yourself, and not able to offload the negative side effects on the rest of us. If that means kicking over our nation state democratic system in favour of a more devolved governance system built on hierarchy then so be it, we need to topple the bankrupt gerantocracy somehow.
Bottom line: majoritarianism and healthy digital spaces are incompatible.
Ads already killed the web. There is a narrow window to use LLMs to resurrect it while behavioural modes are liquid and we can finally aggregate all of the real world events and tie online identities and reputation to participation in physical communities, thereby allowing people to enforce moral norms within distributed and decentralised networks, to sanitise digital public spaces without centralised control systems.
AI-slop is an opportunity to convince people to finally defect from the dominant ad funded paradigm, to disconnect to reconnect.
Maybe we can even kill the ad model entirely by creating a service that is monetised in a manner that aligns with user-purposes and make the use of apps that serve ads into a lower-class or socially disapproved behaviour, like smoking or pissing in the public square. Ads and the engagement model has to be associated with dirt, poor digital hygiene. With a sufficiently powerful alternative you could probably propagate that idea to nurture a vibe shift, starting with women and parents, who would then enforce it on the rest.
We're probably too late to save Gen-Z from the worst effects of the ad funded internet and the bunk ideology of 'revealed preferences', but maybe we can prepare the road for Gen-Alpha.
36 sats \ 0 replies \ @fourrules OP 17 Oct \ parent \ on: Bitcoin exchange | new territory idea AskSN
I wonder if I territory can have reduced permissions, so you can't see it unless you've signed up with a lightning wallet.
I know it's not much of a filter for someone determined, but if it's successful then maybe it could be moved to a domain like stacker.exchange on the same auth system with more advanced features that help to foster Bitcoin as a medium of a exchange.
10 sats \ 0 replies \ @fourrules OP 16 Oct \ parent \ on: Bitcoin exchange | new territory idea AskSN
Fair enough, but there are subreddits that do the same, but are full of scams. I don't think it's much different.
10 sats \ 2 replies \ @fourrules OP 16 Oct \ parent \ on: Bitcoin exchange | new territory idea AskSN
Why would this require hosted wallets? Again, I'm not talking about an escrow service. You zap the bitcoin-buyer directly with a message attached to the zap that allows them to send the voucher to you.
SN would not be an intermediary. The person doing the work would be the person who puts up the bitcoin to start the territory and then moderates it.
20 sats \ 4 replies \ @fourrules OP 16 Oct \ parent \ on: Bitcoin exchange | new territory idea AskSN
If you did that you'd need to restate the rules repetitively, and different people would set slightly or dramatically different terms.
Simple protocols for conducting these exchanges are useful because they can be argued about until optimal terms and processes are agreed by the widest group of people, and thus rough consensus reduces friction. Basically people know what to do and what to expect without needing to read the entire post, and if one party deviates from the protocol and there is a mix-up that results in loss of funds they can't claim that the other party was wrong, whoever deviated from the terms of the territory is by default in the wrong.
60 sats \ 6 replies \ @fourrules OP 16 Oct \ parent \ on: Bitcoin exchange | new territory idea AskSN
Name the existing territory such a bounty would be posted to.
I'm not proposing that SN become a middleman, no more than Facebook or Craigslist are middlemen. I'm not describing or proposing an escrow service or system of dispute mediation.
This is, for better or worse, where every Western country is going. Its being legitimised as a participation income, but basic income is a more popular term.
In other words its a basic income for people who participate in society without being supported by the market.
Its not permanent in the sense that the people receiving the payment permanently get the payment, they have to continue being artists, and when they are added to a list its a lottery system for 2000 artists.
Some people are not included, like comedians (thank God, because government funded comedy would be the worst).
Its terrible because it means artists can't express any political opinions that deviate from the deep state line.
Carer's allowance is another kind of participation income that is seen as legitimate, although the state doesn't want to go there because it would bankrupt it, there are too many kids with autism that cannot function without full-time care. Their parents get almost no support, its a life sentence. But to give them an income that they could use to pay for care would open the door to a wide variety of carers, including those who are only nominally carers but in fact live off the pensions of the people who are supposedly being cared for, such as elderly people.
Really the schemes should be devolved to local communities, distributed to the greatest extent possible, and experiments conducted in narrow districts before rolling them out to "all artists" which just breeds resentment.
We do need a revolution in the idea of a welfare state, if jobs are decimated, and if money has to be printed for redistribution then I'll happily buy bitcoin and leave the system entirely, but I would like to see that money distributed in a decentralised way to people who participate in communities in positive ways.
But our society and elites are just too stupid for this kind of careful exploration of the problem.
Ok I think you're just trying to win a debate instead of thinking objectively. Systems and incentives are complex. KISS doesn't apply even if you'd like it to.
Although it's very simple that being paid and paying are not the same thing, not sure why you can't wrap your head around that.
Ethnically homogeneous and elderly population thinks government has their best interests at heart.
I don't think that gerantocratic fascist ethno-states are anything to aspire to, even if they output these kinds of polls.
No it's the opposite, fundamental distinction. The future is paid-to-post (proof of work), not pay-to-post (proof of stake). Its a distinction as basic and obvious as the distinction between a pro gamer and a pay-to-win game.
SN is just a basic rudimentary version of pay-to-post, like social media back in the innocent days, you have to carry things to their limit, imagine what they'd be like as the dominant paradigm.
Pay-to-post necessarily amplifies the content of the people who can afford to pay more rather than the content people want, the best content within a domain, topic, space, or discipline.
That's not pay-to-post, it's earned reach by gathering patrons, it's demonstrate value by getting paid.
Pay-to-post is pay for influence, and influence generates income. Its proof of stake when scaled up.
Peer verification is nowhere near as hackable if tied to verifiable content (events), and it's far more robust than pay-to-post if the highest layer of peer-endorsement is patronage (monthly donation).
Compared to what I'm describing (a proof of work system for nurturing social consensus within domains and geographic spaces) pay-to-post is just proof of stake.
I think peer-verification tied to verifiable content (events) and backed by a contextual follow and endorsement system and the Pagerank algorithm is the ultimate solution.
Pay-to-post relies on a level of private key literacy that we are decades away from, if the amounts are meaningful at least. Even creating an anonymous account here on SN is beyond the capabilities of most people.
Granted, most people do not want KYC'd social media, but they are comfortable with the process due to online banking, which is not true of private keys.
You really need a bridging solution that combines the positive features of each solution, even allowing KYC-style verification as an option where there is demand from people who don't trust any other type of verification. They can then choose who to engage with, setting their own social filters.