Why should farmers be exempt from inheritance tax that applies to everyone else? It’s a method of wealth redistribution, not just income distribution, it’s actually quite socialist, and one of the only such measures in our system.
Millionaire farmers driving around in their tractors protesting that when they die, their wealth shouldn’t be redistributed to any degree is pathetic.
Why should farmers be exempt from inheritance tax that applies to everyone else?
In theory, the problem is one of compounding assets. If you have a family farm with multiple inheriting children and the farm has to be sold to pay off the inheritence tax debt, who buys them? Inevitably, bigger industrial agriculture firms. So more and more plots are aggregated within a smaller and smaller number of privately owned farming companies.
In practice, this has already happened decades prior (centuries prior, if you look at the history of land ownership in Ireland). The people buying up small plots of land aren’t pioneering farmer entrepreneurs. They’re people explicitly looking to dodge taxes by converting their accumulated wealth into an untaxable asset. So you’re not seeing small farmers shielded from consolidation thanks to inheritance taxes. You’re seeing celebrities and mega-millionaires shielding cash assets behind an accounting trick.
Millionaire farmers driving around in their tractors protesting that when they die, their wealth shouldn’t be redistributed to any degree is pathetic.
Wealth in the UK isn’t being redistributed, its being aggregated. The prior and current governments have gone all in on private equity as a cure for sluggish growth. This is purely Rich Guy on Rich Guy violence.
If you genuinely care about protecting the assets of the working class, you need less middling Starmerism and more radical Maoism.
The maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry
- Michael Parenti
Are the farms collectively owned? If not, why are they collectively subsidized?
Good. Farmers need to be taxed and regulated like all other industries. Unchecked water usage has led to the most inefficient water methods and they don’t pay household rates for water. Little oversight in how pesticides are used so the farmer pays for a helicopter to swoop and spray the area, regardless of the need for pesticides on the entire field with down wind effects for anyone living in the path of the aerosol poisons.
Farmers need to change with the times and start farming like they have satellite pictures and basic math available to them.
I’m fine with Corporate mega farms getting taxed. And I’m in favour of all of us paying taxes “fairly”.
Probably the little people will wait get fucked
Farming subsidies have little to do with the food a nation needs, and everything to do with elections. Countries where farmer’s votes don’t swing elections, don’t have farming subsidies
CGP Gray’s rules for rulers still sticks with me.
I forgot where that was from. Thanks!
Tax breaks for the farmers working the fields, or tax breaks for the international corporations and land speculators that own nearly all the fields?
If we are talking about an industrialized country, then absolutely, farmers need to be taxed just like everybody else. Farmer subsidies leads to overproduction of food, much of which is then intentionally destroyed (by the farmers, or supermarkets) to keep prices high. If you think that the elimination of farmer subsidies will lead to higher food prices and thus hunger, do note that it is possible to redirect subsidies into food allowances for the poor. For instance, the US spends about $14 billion per year in agriculture subsidies (barring covid, during which subsidies jumped to above $40 billion). On the other hand, for the entire world, the cost of eliminating (or drastically reducing) hunger can be as low as $7 billion per year depending on the approach.
And this isn’t even the radical solution. The actually radical solution for eliminating the food problem entirely would be to nationalize the agriculture industry and switch the whole country to a vegetarian diet. If we do this in the entire industrialized world, and fund aggressive hunger elimination programs, then the question of food instability, even taking climate change into account is solved.
Based
Lemmy.
MarxismLenninismMyLandisMyLand >:^[Toddler wants what he wants reality be damned.
