They made money the old-fashioned way: They inherited it

Much amusement is to be had at the moment from watching right-wing thought leaders get themselves in a tizzy over the suggestion that it might not be the purest form of Meritocracy ™ to allow those born into vast wealth to receive 100% of the fruits of the genetic lottery without having to maybe pay some taxes on it at some point:

Now of course what Noah Rothman is really worried about is that Michelle Obama is going to trans him in his sleep, but to take his outrage seriously for a moment:

(1) Rothman’s whining that taxing inherited wealth is punishing the accumulators of that wealth for their “industry” ignores the fact that, in the New Gilded Age, the large majority of vast fortunes were already inherited in the first place, so the only “industry” involved is winning the aforementioned genetic lottery. The idea that people in America are mega-rich because they worked so hard for their wealth requires ignoring all the evidence, which is the most basic of requirements for being a right wing intellectual.

(2) Cries of hypocrisy because the Obamas are themselves very rich (although with a net worth of maybe around $100 million they are still many many multiples short of the fortunes of the true plutocrats) assume that the Obamas don’t way to pay inheritance taxes. I mean I think it’s safe to say that they don’t want to pay inheritance taxes unless similarly situated people are paying inheritance taxes, but that’s called wanting to live in a society of reciprocal obligations, which is another thing that does not compute in right wing intellectual land.

(3) The current inheritance tax exemption is $27 million for married couples, and then 40% of an estate above and beyond that, ignoring for the moment the many devices available to the very rich to defer or avoid altogether inheritance taxes (perpetual trusts and the like). If the Trump inheritance tax exemption is allowed to lapse at the end of next year, when it is scheduled to sunset, the exemption for married couples will fall all the way down to about $15 million, so Connor and Maddie may conceivably have to get some sort of job one day if they want a ski lodge in Davos.

(4) This sort of whinging reminds me of some of the people Lauren Rivera interviewed when she wrote Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs. An informant would tell her “I came from nothing,” and further inquiry would reveal that the person’s parents were both college professors. In a plutocracy that does count as coming form nothing, because what are the chances such a person will ever have a yacht with a helipad, let alone its own IMAX theater?

In other words, the struggle is real.