Argument on the radio: Sander Schimmelpenninck and Stefan Tax are at each other’s throats about inheritance tax

The tax is opposed to an estate tax in principle, he says. “In an ideal world there would be no estate tax. If you’ve earned money on which you’ve paid tax, it’s yours. If you want to help someone with that, if you want to to give to someone, I think that is that the government does not have to participate in this.”

Schimmelpenninck believes there are many good reasons for this. “You used to live in an unequal society where the place where you were born determined your chances in life. Equality of opportunity is an important value: you have to do it yourself, without to give your hand to the government or your father,” he said. The main reason is that the person receiving the inheritance has not done anything for that money. “It’s unearned income,” he says.

Tax thinks this is a bad argument. “There are hundreds of thousands of people on benefits in the Netherlands, who have done nothing for it. You don’t always have to have done something to get something,” he says.

Most people hated tax

The inheritance tax is the most hated tax among the Dutch. This also depends on the moment, when someone has just died. That’s why Schimmelpenninck would like to change the name to ‘receipt tax’: “Then you look at the person who receives it. Then you look at everything that someone has received in their life. he problem with the current inheritance tax is that you can go close and money can fall to the heir.”

Tax also agrees with this. “If someone leaves something, it’s an act of love. And the recipient, if he spends that money, he also pays VAT on it.”