Another reason to want a wealth tax - better data.
> I happen to be related, by marriage, to the 1% (probably even to the 0.1%, but who's counting?) and my sense is that the dissipation is only partial, and functionally-structurally unimportant. In the one case that I know personally, 2 of 4 progeny significantly dissipated their inheritance through exorbitant (obscene, really) lifestyles, but are definitely still in the 1%. The third only has to work in order to top up the trust-fund dividends, and lives with more anxiety as a result than I would wish on anybody (except him). The fourth will never need to work, has Oprah on speed-dial, and makes more in a month off rent and investments than I could make in a good year at my very respectable USG-approved consulting rates. My conclusion: since 25% is still a helluva lot more than 1%, wealth is more sticky than not - although we may never know how much so, until we expropriate the paperwork and analyse it.
The process I'm talking about takes generations. The old WASPs collected their booty, on my Morgan bought the family company model, about 100-120 years ago. They've had four or five generations to piss it away. But they've still got cultural capital. They're Harvard professors or Lewis Lapahm.
Doug