I have to agree with you about some insurance companies, traditional ones at least, that would try…
By: Skye Mo'Ipulelehua Kahoali'I
Tags: Equal Opportunity, Taxes, Democratic Socialism, Inheritance

Photo by Melissa Walker Horn on Unsplash

I have to agree with you about some insurance companies, traditional ones at least, that would try to figure out how to screw over people. The one I have been dealing with most of my life, USAA, has been pretty fair, primarily because they’re chartered as a membership organization, based on military service. For their life policies, suicide results in return of all premiums paid.

There are also whole life policies, which minimize your concerns to an extent but have the drawback of much higher premiums for building cash value, and really have to be started pretty early in one’s life to have real value once parents get up in age where passing becomes a concern. Apparently, the once good advice of save, invest your money wisely, and live frugally still applies. Whoda thunk?

There are also the vehicles of accidental death or dismemberment insurance, which carries high payout, low premiums because of the restrictions you’ve outlined. At this point in my life, it’s all I carry, because my kids are grown and out making their own lives — which is as it should be. It’s there to pay down debt I might die with, so creditors don’t try to saddle them with it, especially seeing how creditors have access to an estate, but not insurance money.

Were traditional life insurance companies try to weasel out of a situation in the way you describe, I would fully expect death benefit companies to spring up whose only requirement to collect would be to die…because they would take part of the proceeds, or even front purchasers of such say, three fourths of the payout money for being named sole beneficiary on the policy, as well as reasonable premiums for operating expenses.

All this, as we both know, is fine for middle-class and upper class families. But my original tenets of implementing the policies of democratic socialism as espoused by Senator Sanders, Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and presidential candidate Andrew Yang aren’t about them. It isn’t they who need the playing field leveled. I speak of raising up the lower classes in our society, ones who are there by way of racism, mysogyny, name your — phobia, and just plain poverty.

You cannot leave anything to heirs when you have nothing to leave them. Perpetuating the cruelly insane belief that each generation should widen the gap between classes by tilting the playing field more and more with each passing inheritance just doesn’t square with the concepts espoused by our American ideals. To say the children of those mired in poverty need to work so much harder just to pull even with their middle class peers does not sit well with me, nor a sizeable part of our population not all of whom are poor.

Consider that if inheritance works as it should, heirs receive a windfall precisely at a time in their lives when it is just that, rather than the needed boost you describe. If parents pass after having lived a long life accumulating their estate, their children are most likely middle-aged, and well on their way to an established estate of their own. Do they need this windfall or is it just nice to have? Do their children or grandchildren need it if we are holding to the tenet that each person should make their way upon their own merits?

I reiterate, do we say that each person should start from an equal place of opportunity, to “bootstrap” themselves up from whatever point we establish in our American society as a viable start line? Or do we continue to pay lip service to this ideal and in reality, push equality for me, but not for thee?

I’m not even saying that people cannot inherit, they just need to a pay taxes for value received, and at a rate high enough to buy some equality back in this modern society that has lost so much of it.

That, or we should just stop pretending, declare that we have a virtual caste system of class stratification that amplifies all the other ills of society. And while we’re at it, we may as well declare who and who does not belong to an American aristocracy and who the peasantry are.