Notes on Tom Bilyeu podcast Aug 24, 2025
Thursday, September 4th, 2025Titled “Should The Government Inherit YOUR Money?”
Right at the start, Tom Bilyeu characterizes an inheritance tax as “Work, work, work, and then hand it over to the government”. Which is actually the opposite of an inheritance tax. An inheritance tax is paid by heirs, people who did no work. And in the US, the inheritance tax only applies to estates of tens of millions of dollars, typically money which no one has paid income tax on.
And then TB conflates inheritance taxes with government ‘confiscation’, and then talks about the terrible history of inheritance taxes. TB strangely thinks that inheritance taxes destroyed the British empire. Very ignorant. What destroyed the British empire was decolonization after WWII, and the loss of comparative advantage as other countries industrialized.
Funny note, confiscation of church lands in England by Henry VIII, and in France after the Revolution was a benefit to the economies of both countries, and confiscation of the estates of aristocrats also benefited the French people.
TB also posits that economic growth requires the ‘momentum’ of inherited wealth. This idea is nonsense. The most innovative companies are not the ones decades old, but new ones. And kids taking over their parents companies have a terrible track record, grandkids, even worse. What is needed for economic growth is capital–personal capital, that is, educated and trained people, and access to capital to start and expand companies.
Then TB pivots to talk about how the rich already pay too much federal tax, and brings up the discredited Laffer curve as proof that higher taxes don’t bring in more money. TB calls inheritance taxes punitive, though who is being punished? Children of rich parents, who did not earn any money themselves. Then TB pretends that estates are made of savings after taxes, which is not the cases, and that taxing the rich is impossible, because they would find loop holes. Seems like tax avoidance by the rich is an easy problem to fix if the rich don’t write the tax laws.
Tom Bilyeu then goes on to say that even if the government was able to collect taxes, the money would be spent ‘inefficiently’. In fact, the US government distributes money very efficiently, and is able to build things private industry can’t or won’t–public infrastructure that is effective at increasing economic growth. And looking historically in the US, and around the world, government investment in public infrastructure is necessary and effective for growing economies. When the US was founded, one of the first things done was to invest in infrastructure–canals, ports, and later public universities, railroads, electrification, GPS, and the interstate highway system, and they have been critical for US growth.
The other main categories of government spending are transfer payments, mainly Social Security and disability, and healthcare, again mainly for the elderly. These programs have a great public benefit–they have almost eliminated extreme poverty in the elderly, but also increase economic growth by transferring money from the rich who tend to save excess money to people who spend it.
And then Tom Bilyeu speaks to his deepest beliefs–government transfer payments (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.) should be eliminated, along with the inheritance tax, and the poor should rely their own ability to work and save, and for the unlucky and unfortunate, the kindness of the rich. And this after TB just complained those born without inheritance do not have the ‘economic momentum’ required to start companies. A return to the US government of the 1870s, but somehow with the all the upsides of the reforms of the past century.