Taking a cue from Thomas Piketty — and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren has introduced the idea of a wealth tax to combat inequality and fund major priorities like health care, child care, and climate change.
The annual tax would target 2 percent of all assets over $50 million, and 3 percent over $1 billion. This would raise an estimated $2.75 trillion over 10 years from what Warren refers to as the “tippy top” — 0.1 percent of American families, according to an analysis by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman at the University of California at Berkeley.
Warren went onto MSNBC to bat back some of the obvious questions: Won’t rich people just squirrel away their assets overseas? Well, her proposal would tax all assets wherever they are — with a heavy assist from new audit powers.
There’s apparently a question as to whether this is Constitutional. The Constitution gives Congress the power to tax; and then there’s the income tax amendment; but apparently there’s a question that a “direct tax”, ie a property tax as far as I can tell, must be proportional to population.
In any event, it’s an interesting framing issue: First is the equity issue, since the wealthy have looted our treasury to the tune of trillions — just in the latest tax cut, the last of a string of bonbons for the wealthy. This is merely a claw-back. There is no reason why we have to simply accept wild inequality as Just How Things Are.
I do think it’s also important to say that this is for tangible public benefits, as Warren says: You’re going to get something from this. As a political matter, I’d kind of prefer we lead with the upside, and then talk about how to pay for it as an afterthought. Such means exist.
And again, note the outsize influence of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She is creating — or perhaps reflecting — a new space for ambitious ideas, which are after all merely an attempt to bring us back from an era of domination by the insanely wealthy. Has any other Congressperson — one of 435! — had greater influence on the public conversation, even before she took office? This 28-year-old is gladly taking the flak and enjoying the fight. MA Congresspeople, take note and speak up!
hesterprynne says
Professor Tribe says the proposal is constitutional.
Charley on the MTA says
Well, I was talking to a tax lawyer friend today, who believes that a.) it should pass constitutional muster on the merits (depending on its structure), and b.) the SCOTUS in its current incarnation will find some reason to kill it. Until I see differently, I have to agree with the cynical view — that the SCOTUS is going to continue to hand down nakedly partisan opinions, because it feels like it, given the slightest pretense.
Trickle up says
(B) for sure. So the question, it seems to me, is, is this a fight worth having anyway?
It seems to me that at this level it is.
SomervilleTom says
An excellent and long-overdue proposal that I enthusiastically support. For those who, like me, are unwilling to pay the ransom demanded by the Boston Globe, the same story is covered by the New York Times and Washington Post.
I note with satisfaction that Ms. Warren explicitly targets wealth, not income. In our adoration of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, we should not overlook the gentle way that Ms. Warren reminds her and us of the distinction between wealth and income.
I’ve been promoting something like this here for years. Since Ms. Warren made her initial announcement of her first Senate campaign right here on our pages, I choose to believe that our advocacy for this wealth tax is directly responsible for keeping it on her radar.
I hope that Ms. Warren and others will couple this proposal with a dramatic increase in the generation transfer taxes (gift and estate taxes). Those should be returned to something like 70-90% of estates valued in excess of $10-15 M.
Our media needs to do its part by redoubling its effort to educate the public about how extreme the current concentration is. People see a number like “2% of wealth over $50 M”, and the number that they remember is $50 M. About 75,000 households will be exposed to this proposed tax, Various analysts estimate that it will bring in about $2.75 trillion over a decade.
That’s $275 BILLION per year. That, in turn, is about $3.7 M per household per year. In order for the average wealthy household to have $3.7 M obligation from a 2% tax, it must have a household wealth of $183 M — ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY THREE MILLION DOLLARS.
An AVERAGE household wealth of ONE HUNDRED EIGHT THREE MILLION dollars. While we have an entire society feeling the pain of economic suffering in today’s America, 75,000 of our wealthiest citizens — about 0.06% of the 127.59 M US households in 2018 — have an AVERAGE household wealth of over $150 M.
The combined wealth of that 0.06% is about $13.7 T. The TOTAL national debt for the US in 2018 is about $22 T. So this tiny slice of our population holds assets worth more than half of our national debt.
We should bear this in mind while we have our passionate arguments about straight-time versus overtime for hourly workers working Sundays and holidays. Yes, of course employers should be forced to pay overtime. But this is a complete distraction from the actual wealth concentration issue.
Our wealth concentration is extreme, and I hope we enthusiastically support Ms. Warren’s proposal to address this urgent crisis.
pogo says
I’m sorry, but I found this aside, “For those who, like me, are unwilling to pay the ransom demanded by the Boston Globe, the same story is covered by the New York Times and Washington Post.” quite disturbing.
People should either stay ignorant and not support the required journalism needed for a free and democratic society.
Or if people feel strongly about empowering journalist to act in their role as a check to power, they should subscribe and support this work.
There is no middle ground. You can’t proclaim to support journalism as a check against the powerful, but then advocate for essentially stealing the work of journalist. That is unsustainable from both a financial point of view and a moral point of view.
SomervilleTom says
The Boston Globe is not journalism. I happily pay monthly subscription fees for the New York Times, Washington Post, and others.
People who feel strongly that we should “support the required journalism needed for a free and democratic society” should, in my opinion, absolutely and clearly reject the propaganda and lies that fill the current Boston Globe.
I enthusiastically agree with you that we who care about journalism must be willing to pay for it (to the extent we are able). I hope you agree that along with that support comes an ability and right to demand that we actually get responsible journalism in exchange for our support.
I stopped paying for the Boston Globe because it long ago (within weeks of being purchased by the Mr. Henry) stopped providing responsible journalism.
pogo says
Given they are all “MSM” organizations, I don’t see the difference between the coverage among the 3 papers (I pay for the Globe and Times). While I not a Globe cheerleader by any stretch of the imagination, I do have to give them HUGE kudos’s for their recent series on BPS valedictorians who have not achieved the success expected, because of the inequality of opportunity for even our smartest kids growing up in poverty.
I also have to commend the Globe spinoff STAT that covers the drug industry. Henry paid for a very expensive court challenge in Kentucky to unseal very critical information about the role of the Slacker Family in causing the opioid crisis.
Sure no ones perfect. But you’ve presented no factual evidence as to why you dismiss the Globe as not “providing responsible journalism” and is filled with “propaganda and lies “. Frankly those are typical round-house punches thrown by the likes of Trump when he’s got nothing to back him up. What do you have to back up your assertions about the Globe?
SomervilleTom says
I think this belongs in a different thread, it’s a distraction from this topic.
pogo says
Love that she is framing the debate that will be forcing other candidates to take a stand. But of course I’ll be picky and suggest raising both the capital gains and unearned income tax rates to be the same as the tax rates on income, is a better “sell” and may very well result in more revenue coming in for the social safety net.
SomervilleTom says
Except that the raising the the capital gains and unearned income tax rates is less effective at targeting the very wealthy.
The point of the exercise is to clawback wealth from the wealthiest of the wealthy. An increase in the two tax rates you describe is both a better sell and also generates more revenue precisely because it hits a MUCH wider range of households.
A wealth tax like this should be paired with a dramatic increase in the gift/estate tax rate for estates above the current threshold set by the GOP ($11.9 M).
Taken together, these new taxes will actually and belatedly address our actual and immediate wealth concentration crisis.
pogo says
A graduated or progressive rate in capital gains and earned income solves that. Let’s bundle all personal income together and tax it with a progressive tax code. You not casting as wide a net, as anyone making 100,000 let’s say–whether they are elderly living off investments or capital gains or income earnings–they all pay the same rate.
Currently I could make 100,000 in earned income, another 100,000 of capital gains of selling stock and then make another 100,000 of unearned income like dividends. Today I’d pay three (relatively low) rates based on earning 100,000 in each category. We should be taxing that person (me) at a higher overall tax bracket of $300,000. (BTW, where does Warren, or anyone, say the point of this exercise is “clawback” wealth? That phrase is about as effective as “Abolish ICE” in terms of trying to persuade people to join the cause.)
Not a lot of house holds that have three streams of income, except for the very rich. And yes to lowering the estate tax threshold.
SomervilleTom says
Hmm.
You’re using six-figure income numbers, while Ms. Warren is contemplating taxing nine-digit wealth. While the former may be a subset of the latter, the two are VERY different. Are you sure you appreciate just how rarified “0.06%” of US households is? We’re talking 0.075 million households out of 127.6 million households.
If it is wealth that we want to tax, and I suggest that it is, then income is at best a proxy for it. There are a countably infinite number of different incomes that can be produced by a a given household with a nine-digit wealth. Any attempt to use a progressive/graduated income tax rate will therefore either not tax some of those (and will therefore be quickly discovered and exploited) or — more likely — will target a great many households outside of this very tiny set.
The term “clawback” is mine, I’m happy to use any other word that means “tax the wealth of our wealthiest households”.
The very fact that such a TINY sliver of our population will produce a multi-billion dollar annual revenue stream from a 2% tax is a great big clanging alarm about the extreme wealth concentration of our economy.
Finally, I do not propose to lower the gift/estate tax threshold (at least here). I instead propose to increase the top rate from the current 40% to something like 70-90% — the top rate was 77% from 1940 until 1976.
Our relentless focus on income tends to blind us to the obscene concentration of wealth that has already occurred. The time has come to explicitly tax the WEALTH of the very wealthy.
petr says
I’m interested to know the actual mechanism of taxation. Those whom we know as ‘famously’ wealthy, Bezos, Buffet, etc are mostly rich in company stock: Jeff Bezos is not sitting on an actual pile of money. Larry Ellison of Oracle, for example, has a couple of billion worth of stock against which he takes loans to fund his pet projects. And, of course, stock prices fluctuate.
Then there’s the paper billionaires like Trump who probably have any number of loose ends, any of which picked at, might bring the entire artifice tumbling down. Not that I’m opposed to that…
While I’m all for it, I’m not at all certain it addresses some of the more slippery aspects of todays wealth…
I don’t understand: if the estate tax is constitutional then this tax is also constitutional. Saying otherwise is just muddying the water.
I think the converse, also, is true: we should focus on what the wealthy got; Warren Buffet bought into GEICO (Which isn’t another way to say ‘gecko’, but rather stands for Government Employee Insurance CO) right at the beginning of a government fueled boom in the insurance market; Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Larry Ellison wouldn’t be anywhere without the government created and funded Internet; and Trump himself wouldn’t have had a fortune to piss away without the Federal government as well as the municipality of New York, New York funding a post-war building boom that enriched Fred Trump. Other wealth like that of Mitt Romney was solely enabled by regulations (carried-interest and changes to leverage laws). Scratch the surface of most wealth and you’ll very quickly get to the government.
Each and every dollar ‘earned’ by these men is a government success story and they should pay some back to the government that enabled and enriched them. And they know it.
tedf says
The estate tax is an excise tax—a tax on the privilege of transferring the property to one’s heirs or devises. The proposal is a direct tax on property. This distinction is the reason why one is constitutional and the other (likely, IMHO) is not without a constitutional amendment.
petr says
I’m not at all convinced that this proposal is “a direct tax on property.” Do we even have that much ‘real’ property? And if we did wouldn’t existing property taxes cover it? (making this the dreaded ‘double taxation’?) That’s why I asked about the actual mechanism… Maybe it’s a tax on ‘assets’ (which isn’t the same as ‘property’) and with all the complexities thereunto…
Regarding similarity to the estate tax: I think there is a plausible excise involved in the transfer of wealth from the company to the individual, via stock/ownership. My entire point, really, was that there are complexities and problems that aren’t tractable in an ‘aim there and hit the bullseye’ way that people think of, at least in the same way we approach the more prosaic ‘property tax‘…
Christopher says
Pretty sure the 16th amendment allows tax on income “from whatever source derived” and given that technically nobody is born wealthy any assets they do have could be construed as having at one point been income in the broadest sense of the term.
tedf says
Christopher, I think this is obviously wrong.
Christopher says
Care to elaborate?
tedf says
Under our tax laws, if I receive a gift or an inheritance, the gift or inheritance is not treated as income. The person making the gift or leaving me the inheritance might be taxed, at the federal level, on the transfer, but the recipient is not.. I just wanted you to avoid a frolic or detour that is clearly incorrect under the law.
Christopher says
I understand that’s not how the law is currently written. I was only pointing out that I thought it could be written that way and not run afoul of the Constitution.
tedf says
Anything is possible, but it would be very strange to lawyers to say that a gift is income, or that an inheritance is income.
Christopher says
Why not? It is money you once did not have, but has since “come in” to your possession.
Steve Consilvio says
This plan won’t really work. Most ‘wealth’ is controlled by corporations not individuals. Granted, some individuals control the corporations, but how do you tax a business for being “big.” Another problem is that “wealth” is a fluid amount. When someone pays $38 million for an apartment in NYC, as happened recently, and you tax them on it, how do they make their assets liquid to pay the tax? While the assumption is that those at the top can figure it out, they will surely pass the buck to wherever their revenue stream source originates, and will raise prices or cut workers, pay or benefits or squeeze vendors. Capitalism is a vicious circle. While this approach may be emotionally satisfying, it fails to address the problem of inequality in a meaningful or sustainable way. Whichever head at the top you cut off, it will be replaced by a new one. Attack the feet and the whole body will fall. There is also the problem of knowing how to value or record these assets. It seems likely to be an easy dodge. Also, of the three tax forms (income, sales and property) the worst tax of all is property. Property tax is the most regressive and illogical and encourages speculation and inflation. Taxing only at the top of a corrupt system leaves all the corruption (intellectual and criminal) in place. A smart policy of real estate deflation would raise the standard of living for everyone and reduce the value of these asset hoards immediately, and simultaneously reduce inequality and volatility. It would also make it impossible for Russian criminals to launder money through Trump towers and other property.
daves says
If you own stock in a corporation, that is part of your wealth. Easily done.
Steve Consilvio says
Then why not just reduce the values of stocks 10% automatically every year? That would have the same result of reducing the concentration of wealth by the major stockholders. Of course, that would not result in a credit for the government, and would blow people’s minds, since they think fictitious stocks should fictitiously increase in value perpetually. At some point we need to come to terms with the fact that the whole system is a giant intellectual farce, and is about as real as alchemy or the divine bloodlines of monarchy. Modern finance is a joke, and the National Debt of $22 Trillion is proof of that. How much more empirical evidence is necessary?
“Moe, I can’t see! I can’t see!”
“What’s the matter?”
“I got my eyes closed. Nyuk Nyuk”
boink
scott12mass says
I would be more impressed with her idea if it came with a little personal sacrifice. She thinks those with more than 50 million are “too” wealthy. What magic algorithm picked that amount. She is only worth 8 – 10 million, not sure if those estimates include her 2 million dollar Cambridge house. So she’s barely getting by?
Why don’t you set the wealth bar much lower say 5 million dollars? Who needs or deserves more than that. No one needs to drive a Lexus, they can get places just as easy with other cars. Corolla’s for everyone. Statistics can be manipulated but I’ve seen the median savings account in the US at 5 thousand. The median 401k at 60 thousand. The median income was somewhere around 55 thousand. I don’t think the 60 – 70 % of Americans living paycheck to paycheck would have a problem dropping the threshold from 50 million down to 5 million. (I have a harder time believing the paycheck to paycheck stat than the others but who knows.)
Just don’t get below 2 million because that would be unfair and confiscatory. Spread the money around and restart the game. If you had invested $220.00 in Apple stock in 1980 it would be worth $124,000.00 today. Of course two years ago you could have bought Sears stock at $17 a share, and now it’s worth 0.40 cents. It will be tough to decide how to carry out confiscation of property when someone buys remote lakefront property, builds a house and develops a priceless view of sunsets across the lake.
SomervilleTom says
The algorithm isn’t “magic” and doesn’t need to be. It is, in fact, rather straightforward. It goes something like this:
1. Construct and examine the wealth distribution curve for the United States. You’ll need a big piece of paper and log scales, because in order to show the location of the wealthiest households a linear scale obscures the differences of everyone else. It’s very hard to show the location of the nearest star on the same map that shows the difference between two houses in the same neighborhood.
2. Estimate the desired amount of revenue from the new tax, for example $2B per year.
3. Estimate the rate of the new tax, for example 1%.
4. Slice the tail from (1) so that it’s area corresponds to (2) and (3).
What your objections fail to recognize is the obscene intensity of our wealth distribution. Ms. Warren, with her net worth of $8-10 M (using the number you cited) is not “wealthy” by these standards.
Our consumer economy is being strangled because so much of our wealth is concentrated in the very top end that our children who graduate from college with a Bachelor’s degree can’t get work that pays enough to let them form their own household.
There is a “knee” somewhere in the curve between $50 M and about $1 M — I don’t know where — so that the number of households explodes when the threshold is below that knee. I suspect that this knee is somewhere comfortably below $50 M, in order to keep the tax focused on the very wealthy.
In short, the numbers you’re tossing around — $5K (savings account), $2M (Cambridge house), $60K (401K), $120K (Apple stock bought for $220 in 1980) are literally noise-level blips in comparison to the numbers we’re talking about.
According to sites like this, Sheldon Adelson has a net worth of $35.4 B. That’s $35,400,000,000. On a day like Wednesday of this week when the market changes by 0.18%, Mr. Adelson’s portfolio changed by six BILLION dollars. The market is open 6.5 hours per day — 390 minutes. Mr. Adelman’s net worth changed by about $16 M in the average MINUTE of that relatively quiet day on the NYSE.
Sixteen MILLION dollars per minute. That’s about ten times the value of Ms. Warren’s Cambridge house. Your focus on lifetime numbers that are orders of magnitude smaller than this is misplaced. Wealth concentration is the issue. In order to solve that issue, we must target excessive wealth. The average 401K is irrelevant.
It is long past time to revive our consumer economy by transferring a small portion of the extreme wealth held by the extremely wealthy to the rest of us.
Christopher says
She’s not claiming she’s struggling, and I believe supports more progressive income rates as well.
johntmay says
I’m pleased to see the tide changing and it’s up to Democrats (the real ones) to keep up the pressure. No one “earns” the massive salaries that we read about in the news, they take it.
In 1965, CEO pay to worker pay was 20 times the average worker’s pay, now it’s more than 250 times the average worker. These CEO’s have not “developed a superior skill set”, they are not “working longer hours” and they have not greatly increased their level of education (all things that politicians tell the working class will ease the wide and widening wealth gap) . No, they have slowly and steadily increased their political influence in both political parties to the extent that they run the country.
When I watch the so-called liberal media and listen to some of my fellow Democrats, I am shocked, puzzled, and saddened that many of them refer to political figures like Ocasio-Cortez and Warren as “far left”.
Friends, our party has been pulled so far to the right that people like me and my friend Senator Elizabeth Warren who are proud to call ourselves “FDR Democrats” are seen as “far left”?
This is good news from Senator Warren and I am even more confident in my decision a few weeks ago to support her presidential campaign.
tedf says
Better, I think, to aim to restore the federal estate tax to the pre-GWB system of relatively low exemptions, for the following reasons:
1. It is undoubtedly constitutional.
2. It should be an easier political lift. If Congress can’t revive the estate tax, how could it possibly pass a wealth tax?
3. It would reach a larger percentage of people—the original exemption, if I recall, was $600,000–though in practice tax planning, especially for married couples, means that more than that—but not infinitely more—can be passed to the next generation.
I would also focus attention on legislative efforts, successful in some places, to eliminate the rule against perpetuities, thereby allowing the creation of dynastic trusts. But that work would have to be done at the state level.
Of course the yearly revenue would be lower, though that could be addressed in part by tinkering with marginal rates.
SomervilleTom says
Your item 3 is, in my view, precisely why we should not follow this route.
Reaching a larger percentage of people is an explicit non-goal.
The goal of Ms. Warren’s tax proposal is to recover a portion of the excessive wealth of our wealthiest individuals.
A 2-3%/year tax on the net worth of the wealthiest 75,000 households in the United States is surely more fair than, for example, the current average 1.21% property tax rate of Massachusetts.
We have exempted our wealthiest households from paying their fair share long enough.
terrymcginty says
In any case it’s great to see real policy proposals that are more than ultra-safe boilerplate offered so early in the campaign. Thanks for the reminder about potential legal problems with it as well.
daves says
I’m surprised that folks are having such a hard time wrapping their heads around this. Many of us pay a wealth tax every year — its called a real estate tax. Warren’s proposal could be fine tuned as to rate, the kind of assets subject to tax, etc, but it really is not that exotic in substance. I note that an advantage of a tax on assets is that it is not cyclical, as opposed to a capital gains tax, which can vary greatly from year to year. I would be curious to hear Professor Tribe’s full analysis on the Constitutionality of the tax.
SomervilleTom says
Indeed. Even on this thread, we see a comment with the irrelevant observation that the property tax is regressive.
A tax that is only applied to net worth above $50M is, by construction, not “regressive”. A real estate property tax is regressive because the the tax is the same for a $1 M property inherited by a senior couple in Cambridge for whom it is far and away their largest asset and the same $1 M property in the portfolio of a real estate speculator with tens or hundreds of similar assets. The resulting property tax is a much larger burden on the first owner than on the second.
Ms. Warren’s proposed wealth tax is, by construction, completely different from this. Every household with, for example, $750 M in assets will pay the same wealth tax. It cannot be “regressive”.
This new wealth tax, combined with a greatly increased gift/estate tax — for example 80% of any gift or estate valued in excess of $12 M — will go a very long way towards solving our crushing wealth concentration issue.
In so doing, it will go a long way towards restoring the economic health of today’s suffering Americans — most especially, our suffering young people.
Steve Consilvio says
SomervilleTom You criticize what you don’t understand. My comment is not “irrelevant” but gets to the heart of the issue of inequality. Every tax, if not progressive, is automatically regressive. Any flat tax is regressive. Massachusetts has a regressive sales tax and a regressive income tax.
Yet, I described property tax as the worst. This is because you are taxed for what you own. The other two tax you for what you earn or what you spend, which assumes some sort of active flow, but taxing you for what you own means you never actually own it. It’s more of a license to rent. If you are in arrears of property taxes for $1000, the town can take your home that could be worth quite a bit more. So not only do you not own your property, but any punishment for failing to pay your taxes is grotesquely disproportionate.
We have the same issue with banking foreclosures where a bank takes back a house over three missed payment when your equity in the property is significantly more. Let’s not forget how the Rule of 78 rigs the payment of the mortgage disproportionately in the banks favor, too. If Warren were serious about going after the rigged system, she should be criticizing the Rule of 78, which is the single greatest source of wealth inequality.
The reason for the Prop 2.5 movement was because people are taxed for what they own, but their income, especially in retirement, does not keep pace with the inflation of real estate values. This is why I suggested the need to smartly regulate property values. Without regulating property values, any reform is for naught. Inflation will automatically concentrate wealth and increase the divide, AND increase volatility AND quicken financial collapse, which is perpetually solved by increasing the National Debt. It is the only possible release for the mathematical madness.
When Warren repeats Clinton’s claim that people who play by the rules shouldn’t get hurt, it ignores the flaws within the rules themselves that GUARANTEE that the majority will lose. It’s just like a game of Monopoly. Once you have an advantage, and inheritance is a huge advantage, that advantage compounds over time, Taxing the .001 at the top is BY NO MEANS a structural change or even a short term solution. It will be as powerless a policy as the 2.5% movement. You can’t fix the problem without properly diagnosing the cause.
The real enemy is inflation which is found in ‘percentages added.’ Whether the percentage stems from interest, taxes, profits or wages, the end result is the same. Everyone’s revenue is somebody else’s expense. Since all money is a fiat accounting trick, we are simply authoring the problem we are trying to escape in the numbers we write down. If we write down different numbers, then we will get a different result. It does not have to be wage and price controls in the way the Soviets did it, or even in the way that Nixon suggested, but we do need to have a basic understanding of how wages and prices interact and AUTOMATICALLY lead to the concentration of wealth.
As Adam Smith wrote, a nation with the highest rate of profit goes to ruin the fastest, He has been turned on his head by neoliberals claim of a free market. Adam Smith would be appalled at the income inequality. The ‘wealth’ in wealth of nations was the social contract, and it was accomplished by ‘buy low-sell low.’
There is so much economic hypocrisy is our current politics that it is mind-bending, but pretty much everyone’s solution is for more for themselves and less for the other guy, which is just a perpetual ‘buy low-sell high’ mindset of the ends will justify the means. In reality, the means are the ends.
Corporations and Wall Street are the source of all expansive wealth, funded through the National Debt. These same groups set the prices and set the wages, and generally set the tax policy as well. Warren is right that the system is rigged somewhat, but she misses the fact that 1) wealth compounds automatically and 2) everyone is equally responsible because the behavior is ubiquitous from the top to the bottom.
People say the Patriots cheat, but in reality they just play smarter and harder and keep pushing their advantages to the max. A competitive marketplace must create many losers for the one winner. It is not a ‘natural’ occurrence. The rules demand it. The rules could just as easily be focused on commonwealth; peace and prosperity for all.
It does not make sense to have a competitive marketplace devoid of a social contract. The math has no mercy, and we must reap what we record. Only people can have mercy, and if we want different results, so everybody wins, then we need fundamentally different rules.
Blaming the winners for winning doesn’t actually make sense and redistributing some of the wealth of the ,01 at the top won’t change anything, just as the minimum wage and private pensions wasn’t enough deliver what the New Deal promised. We need to do an autopsy on the New Deal, rather than trying to keep parts of it alive like Frankenstein. Redistribution of wealth through tax policy is a dead end. We need to stop beating this dead horse.
I should also add that what we have isn’t capitalism at all. It’s Feudalism 2.0 We are all serfs, but rather than being bound to the land, our financial bondage is mobile, which we carry through a 30 year mortgage. We drop dead and somebody else becomes bonded for 30 years to the same property, Yes, those of inherited wealth, like royalty of old, have advantages of birth, but they are likewise subject to the same forces of inflation. The system is volatile for everyone, which is why money is surrounded by so much visceral fear.
SomervilleTom says
Thanks for posting
fredrichlariccia says
76% of Americans support higher taxes on the super rich according to new POLITICO poll released today.