Additionally, as well as 100% Inheritance tax with exceptions for personal items (inheritance is the biggest game breaker in a fair system), another very practical and fair idea would be no VAT/sales tax (disproportionately affects the poor) and vastly reduced business taxes; however
Progressive personal income taxation that works like the effects of relativity on the speed of light (no tiny group of bands that end at a middling percent and allow capital gains but rather a direct calculation from the income; the more non-charitably allocated income, the even higher the tax rate approaching 90+% in the stratospheric levels, encouraging investment in business, employment, public good projects etc, just like the old rich guys in the early 20th century building all those public libaries. All of these resources held in the public trust (as well as complete citizen ownership of natural resources and most land; nobody should have rights to important earth resources because their daddy had a piece of paper they got from their slave plantation) used for basic income & investment in automation as well as myriad other public good projects.
> Additionally, as well as 100% Inheritance tax with exceptions for personal items
A more plausible (less confiscatory, but recognizing that inheritance is income and that untaxed inheritances fail to reflect this) alternative would probably be taxing inheritances as income to the recipient and allowing them to be split over a set period of years (say, 5-10) for tax purposes.
100% inheritance tax is a bit ridiculous - if I'd die today in a car accident, my family already would lose it's main income and suffer; and you'd suggest taking away my savings from my widow&toddlers at that point?
And even if you'd really want this, it's feasible only if you also have a 100% tax on gifting stuff - otherwise any old/sick person would simply gift their wealth to whoever he wants to leave (generally taxed at the normal income tax rate) or buy/sell stuff at very advantageous terms for the same effect; or take an expensive life insurance policy that'd pay out as much as he'd like to his relatives.
The amount of revenue gained in a near 100% system would guarantee basic income for all, including children. This is my point. Take away gifting and nepotism and automatically assign an equal amount of potential resources to each child from birth.
You can't take away gifting unless you take away private property - how you can prevent me spending my resources (no matter how much/little of them I may have) on rising my kids instead of myself?
The natural unit of the economy isn't a person, it's the household - all the legislation and market theory is about resource flows between households, we've never had societies that were able (or even intending) to control resource flows within a household. The only way to ensure equal resources to each child from birth would involve also fully centralizing childcare - i.e., taking them away from parents and raising them all equally by some single anonymous system; but I'd call that a dystopia.
I do want my children to have an advantage in resources if I can help it, it's a natural property of homo sapiens and most other mammals to care about their offspring.
You can take away 'nepotism' in that sense as soon as you're able to genetically modify our species to have a different psychology than homo sapiens - and while we're at it, this could also solve wars, greed and a bunch of other problems.
Implementing what you propose might be possible, but it would require to apply violent force on a mass scale, as almost all people would naturally want to circumvent the system at some point and need to be forcibly prevented from that - or it all goes back to the "communism" where in theory everybody is equal but in practice it's just empty words and everybody cheats the system.
