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Everybody's Talkin' 'Bout Taxes--especially Wealth Taxes and Mark-to-Market of Capital Gains

Not surprisingly for those of you who are members of the ABA Tax Section, there is a meeting of that group next week in Florida when a thousand tax lawyers (give or take a few) will be talking about everything from basis to wealth taxes; GILTI, BEAT, Dual BEIT, to EITC.  Yours truly will be on a panel of the Tax Policy and Simplification Committee, meeting Friday morning, to discuss how the tax system should respond to the wealth gap.  Joining me on the dais will be Roger Royse (moderator and panelist), Rich Prisinzano from the Penn Wharton Budget Model, and Dan Shaviro, Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation at NYU and a blogger at Start Making Sense.  We'll talk about the income and wealth gap data, including the different perspectives of  Saez & Zucman, serving as wealth tax advisers to Senator and Democratic presidential candidate hopeful Elizabeth Warren; Penn Wharton Budget Model, applying a more standard budget model to determine harms and benefits of the Warren Wealth Tax; and Cato INstitute.  We'll also discuss Sen. Ron Wyden's proposal for a mark-to-market system of capital gains taxation (including a lookback charge of some kind for hard-to-value assets, Prof. (and former Cleary partner) Edward Kleinbard's Dual Business Enterprise Income Tax proposal, and other means of making the regular tax system more progressive such as rates, removing the capital gains preference, and reinvigorating the estate tax that has been the object of a GOP murder squad for the last 20-30 years at least.

Meanwhile, today in Florida there was a Tax Policy Lecture at  the University of Florida on Taxing Wealth, with Alan Viard, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, David Kamin, Professor at NYU School of Law, Janet Holtzblatt, Senior Fellow at the Tax Policy Center, and William Gale, Arjay and Frances Fearing Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy7 at the Brookings Institution. 

Last fall, the Tax Policy Center held a program on Taxing Wealth (webcast recording available at this link) with Mark Mazur, Ian Simmons, Janet Holtzblatt, Beth Kaufman, Greg Leiserson, Victoria Perry, and Alan Viard.  Sony Kassam from Bloomberg Tax served as moderator.  The link has a series of power point presentations from that meeting as well, for your edification.

Ian Simmons, for example, includes the letter from billionaires dated June 24, 2019, asking that "[t]he next dollar of new tax revenue should come from the most financially fortunate, not from middle-income and lower-income Americans."  Such a tax "enjoys the support of a majority of Americans--Republicans, Independents, and Democrats."  It's not a new idea, since all those millions of middle-income Americans who own their home "already pay a wealth tax each year in the form of property taxes on their primary form of wealth--their home."   The billionaires are asking "to pay a small wealth tax on the primary source of our wealth as well"--such as Elizabeth Warren's proposal, which would tax "only 75,000 of the wealthiest families in the country" (those with assets over $50 million) and would generate an estimated $3 trillion over ten years to "fund smart investments in our future, like clean energy innovation to mitigate climate change, universal child care, student loan debt relief, infrastructure modernization, tax credits for low-income families, public health solutions, and other vital needs."  All this is necessary because of the wealth gap: "[t]he top 1/10 of 1% of households now have almost as much wealth as all Americans in the bottom 90%." The signatories support a wealth tax because:

• it's a powerful tool for solving our climate crisis
• it's an economic winner for America through increased public investments
• it will make Americans healthier, addressing the difference in longevity (15 years) between the richest and the poorest Americans
• It's fair -- "[t]axing extraordinary wealth should be a greater priority than taxing hard work."
• It strengthens American freedom and democracy, since high levels of economic inequality lead to political power and pluotocracy and higher levels of distrust in democratic institutions
• It is patriotic -- 'The richest 1/10 of the richest 1% should be proud to pay a bit more of our fortune forward to America's future."

Janet Holtzblatt discussed whether wealth should be taxed, with a set of powerful powerpoint charts.  As she notes, there are a number of reasons to think taxing the wealthy is a good idea because it (slide 4) :

• curbs the accumulation of power that comes with the accumulation of wealth--and, I will add, this is power to get laws and regulations written in your favor, including tax laws, as well as power that allows pollution, rent-seeking, on-demand schedules for workers and other 'evils' that come with plutocracy
• ensures that the wealth pay their fair share of taxes
• finances new initiatives (child care, student debt relieve, climate change policies, housing initiatives)
• provides better data for research on wealth inequality

Those not supportive (or, as JH puts it, "less optimistic") suggest that (slides 5, 7)

• even with a wealth tax, the rich remain the richest and the most powerful
• incremental changes to current tax system would be more easily implemented
• wealth taxes would have a negative impact on savings, investment, entrepreneurship
• wealth taxes won't raise as much revenue as claimed
• OECD countries with wealth taxes haven't been all that successful (in 1990 12 had them, in 2018 only 3 still retained wealth taxes: Norway, Switzerland, and Spain)

There are lots of issues with wealth taxes: (slides 8-20)

• on what assets
• at what rate (tax burden will depend partly on rate of returns on investments
• using what exemption threshold (liquidity constraints at lower thresholds; taxing  middle income instead of wealthy)
• using what means to prevent tax avoidance (dependents' wealth with parents? include assets in family-run foundations? restrictive limits for trusts? exit taxes?)
• and tax evasion (enhance IRS enforcement, enhance penalties, enhance IRS access to third party data--but the wealthy have resources to battle IRS claims)
• assuming what actual amounts of tax revenues could be raised ("street fights over revenue estimates...among top public finance economists") (Slide 15)
  • how much wealth is there?  JH notes several 2016 estimates between 86.9 trillion and 101.2 trillion (slides 16-17) {Zucman  says just under $115 trillion]
    
    • Fed Reserve Survey of Consumer Finance ( 3 year intervals; leaves out Forbes 400 and some pension wealth)
    • estate tax data (adjusted for mortality probabilities and population)
    • income tax data (capitalized using assumed rates of returns)
  • how is that wealth distributed between the top 0.1% and the rest?  Bricker 2016 study estimates range from about 15% to 22%  (Slide 18)
  • how much wealth is hidden by "tax net misreporting rates"?  IRS 2016 misreporting: farms 71%; nonfarm proprietors 64%; CGs 27%; PS/SCorps/Estates/Trusts 16%  (slide 19)
  • how much tax revenues?  between 815 billion and  1.098 trillion between 2021-2030 (slide 22, Urban-Brookings TPC Microsimulation Model [ with lower thresholds and rates than those proposed by Warren]
  • who pays?  40,000 tax units in the top 1% minus the top 0.1%; 127,000 tax units in the top 0.1%,with those in the top 0.1% paying between 97% and 100% on the different options considered

Greg Leiserson discussed the idea of mark-to-market taxation (an idea that Ron Wyden has endorsed), in "Taxing wealth by taxing investment income: An introduction to mark-to-market taxation" (Sept 11, 2019).  The key to MTM taxation is that a tax is assessed annually on investments, whether or not they are sold or otherwise disposed of ('through a transaction that results in "realization" for federal income tax purposes).  The burden of such a tax falls predominantly on the wealthy, since those are the primary owners of bonds, stocks, real estate empires, and pass-through businesses that produce investment income, as well as the appreciation of those assets that is taxed currently as a capital gain on disposition.  Leiserson provides a chart (below) showing the nominal investment income of US households and nonprofits including an offset for inflation.

As he notes, much of this income is taxed at preferential capital gains rates, and much of the income tax is deferred because capital gains and losses are generally taxed only when the asset is sold.  Deferral amounts to a reduction in taxes paid under time-value-of-money principles.  But yet another way in which owners of investment assets escape taxation is the estate tax: appreciation in property in the estate (such as unrealized capital gains from stock that has appreciated in value significantly over decades) is never taxed, since the heirs get a step up in basis to market value, so that if the asset were then immediately sold, there would be no gain remaining.

MTM taxation eliminates the deferral advantage.  MTM taxation combined with elimination of the preferential rate for capital gains would  eliminate the preferential treatment of capital gains that exists in current law.  Leiserson notes the difficulties for a MTM system: which assets are covered, rate of tax applied, and whether there are special rules for volatility. Further, "[i]f a comprehensive system of mark-to-market taxation is enacted, then there would be no unrealized gains at death going forward, because gains will have been taxed on an annual basis, including in the year the person dies" so long as the system applies over some transition period to gains accrued prior to enactment.  Otherwise, the system would have to tax gains at death (repealing step-up in basis rule) or at any other disposition, including gifts, to ensure fair and equal treatment.  He suggests other measures--such as limiting the home sales capital gain exclusion or requiring mandatory distributions of pension account balances above a threshold, that would be reasonable in a MTM context.

One difficulty with MTM taxation is valuation of assets that are not regularly traded.  Ron Wyden's proposal suggests a lookback charge--an additional tax payment for assets not subject to MTM taxation that is collected upon disposition to account for the deferral value while still relying on realization as a trigger for taxation. Wyden and Leiserson suggest different possible methods.  One is to take the gain upon sale and allocate it ratably to each year between purchase and sale, compute the tax on each year's income at the rate applicable in that year, and then calculate interest on those unpaid taxes for the years til payment. Unrealized gains would be deemed realized on death or gift and taxed accordingly.

Three key ideas here:

• To protect lower and middle income taxpayers from the tax, there could be a lifetime gain  exemption threshold ($0.5 million, say) that has to be reached before the rules apply or an asset value threshold ($2 million; $10 million, etc.).  Under the latter, taxpayers would fall into and out of the MTM regime as assets fluctuate.  (The asset approach is suggested by Wyden.)
• The revenue raised is significant though it depends on the particular model.  Leiserson suggests MTM combined with elimination of the preferential rate on capital gains "could easily raise $1 trillion over the next decade--and potentially much more."  He notes that just eliminating the preferential CG rate gives a much lower estimate--that's because of "the ease of tax avoidance under current law such as the ready opportunity to defer tax by not selling assets and potentially avoid tax entirely through step up in basis--all while simply borrowing against these same assets to finance any spending."
• "The wealthiest 1 percent of families holds 31 percent of all wealth, and the wealthiest 10 percent holds 70 percent of all wealth."  "The highest-income 1 percent of families receives 75 percent of the benefit of the preferential rates for capital gains and dividends under current law." The wealthiest 10% would bear the burden of MTM reforms.

 

Of course, while everybody is talking about taxes, some of that talk is the same old endless market fundamentalist myth (Reaganomics) about how tax cuts are what make the economy grow and will actually pay for themselves -- in spite of near 4 decades of evidence to the contrary, where highest growth rates have generally been in times of higher tax rates, with some consideration for stimulus impact of tax cuts after periods of recessions.  See, e.g., NY Times editorial, There's No Such Thing as a Free Tax Cut (Jan 22, 2020).  The op-ed notes that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin "repeated the risible fantasy that the Trump administration's 2017 tax cuts will bolster economic growth sufficiently for the government to recoup the revenue it lost by lowering tax rates" [in the 2017 tax legislation] even though 2 years in, the "budget deficit has topped $1 trillion." This is because, as most of us who haven't drunk the Laffer-curve tax cut kool-aid know and the Times op-ed reiterates, "businesses responded to increased demand more than they did to the lower tax rates."  Nonetheless, we should not be surprised that the Trump Administration is talking about two "big ideas" for taxes if the man gets reelected:  1) cutting Medicare and Social Security: see, e.g., Trump Opens Door to Cuts to Medicare and Other Entitlement Programs, NY Times (Jan 22, 2020) and 2) passing another tax cut bill: see Steven Mnuchin Confirms Trump's New Tax Plan is Imminent, USNews (Jan 23, 2020).  Those two ideas go hand in hand. 

Though Trump doesn't dare state what he is really doing to his base, who he has deceived with typical right-wing rhetoric into thinking that he is trying to rightsize the economy to serve them when he instead engages in class warfare to stuff his own pockets, he is hip to hip with Newt Gingrich's desire to "starve the government" to create a huge deficit (we are up to $1 trillion in our new "gilded age economy") that then provides cover for the wealthy to suck in even more of the country's wealth by downsizing Medicare and Social Security, programs essential for those who are not among the wealthy. 

 

Bloomberg's Plan for Addressing Economic Inequality: not a wealth tax

A week ago (Jan 8, 2020), the New York Times described Michael Bloomberg's plan¹ for addressing the income and wealth inequality in the United States that has been a constant topic of discussion by Democratic candidates.  Briefly, as with the robber barons of Teddy Roosevelt's age, the wealth of the global commerce titans and particularly the private equity fund buyers and sellers of companies (and layers off of employees) has exploded over the last four decades in the US, beginning in earnest with Ronald Reagan's presidency.  Most of the benefits of productivity gains have gone to a very few people at the top, and the bottom 50% of the wealth distribution actually owns a smaller share of the nation's wealth than 40 years ago.  The top 1% have gained enormously, and the top 0.5% have been even more enriched.  We have ultra multibillionaires like Jeff Bezos who can pay $9 billion to his wife in a divorce settlement and still be the wealthiest man in the world with more than $130 billion in net worth.  He earns about $78.5 billion a year (counting value of his Amazon shares) or more than $6.5 billion a month² and thus exemplifies this new "gilded age" of ultrawealthy tycoons.  This exists at the same time that the Trump administration proposes work requirements that will eliminate food stamp aid for 700,000 of hungry Americans and, with other initiatives, will take  food stamps from 3.7 million beneficiaries who simply cannot get work that pays well enough to fund a sustainable lifestyle for themselves and their families.³  This will "save" the U.S. about $5.5 billion over five years--less than Bezos 'earns' in a month.  This disparity--$5.5 billion to feed 3.5 million hungry Americans versus provide a month's additional wealth for a person already wallowing in wealth like Jeff Bezos--is why it is clear that the US needs to figure out how to respond to the inequality crisis in order to protect American democracy and ensure Americans have a decent standard of living.

Bloomberg's plan seems to be a moderate stance like Obama and Biden that attempts to focus on factors other than the wealth gap and the accompanying power gap that wealth provides.  As the NY Times reports, he "frames the economic divide primarily in regional terms--and not along ... rich-versus-everyone-else class lines."¹  The Times article notes that his plan is not unlike the charge Obama gave to Joe Biden for the Middle Class Task Force.¹

Bloomberg's proposals for addressing the problem are similarly centered on things long discussed and tried that are difficult to do at a large enough scale to make any inroads into the inequality problem or the power gap problem. He is most definitely not proposing a wealth tax.  His proposals include a focus on education and skills training, infrastructure projects, and entrepreneurial training centers.  Although the GI Bill was a significant part of the post-WWII economic boom because it allowed vast numbers of returning veterans to get a college education, Bloomberg seems to be thinking more of apprenticeships and community colleges (training for a job) rather than university (training for a career and an approach to learning throughout life).  The Times notes his interest in raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, and encouraging unions while disallowing noncompetes for low- and middle-income jobs. 

All those are minimal steps that any progressive candidate should take, but while they may have marginal impact on middle class mobility, they will not do much at all to ease the income and wealth gap that has been caused by technology, globalization, and financialization of the economy together that has measured success almost solely from stock market numbers and thus allowed corporate and private equity tycoons to garner the major gains in productivity over decades while paying their workers too little (or moving offshore to pay even less), combined with a tax system that privileges wealth, including, among a host of others, extremely favorable corporate tax provisions after the 2017 tax legislation, ridiculously low maximum rates on ordinary income, carried interest provision, section 1031 exchanges, section 1202 exclusion for gains on original issue small business stock, capital gains preference, and an absurdly low flat estate tax above a too-high exemption amount with a step-up in basis for heirs. 

Bloomberg is a billionaire who is at least aware that the inequality in this country is problematic and needs to be addressed.  But like most of the "have-so-much" class, he shows little interest in what is truly required--a shift in the direction of redistribution to balance the distorted seesaw of billionaires getting all the height and the rest sitting at the bottom.  FDR's New Deal is said to have worked because the robber barons were scared that the proletariat would rise up in support of communism--the so-called 'red scare' behind the success of social security enactment.  There may not be a red scare now (though the Trump campaigners try to paint democratic socialist programs as communism), but there is a real likelihood that the contrast--and possibly real class warfare-- between the squalor and despair of poor families who work hard but cannot fend for themselves and rich kids with silver spoons that only grow bigger and bigger  may eventually threaten the global nation of the plutocrats.⁴

 

1 Jim Tankersley, Michael Bloomberg's Jobs Plan is Focused on Place over Class, New York Times (Jan 8, 2020).

2 Hillary Hoffower, We did the math to calculate how much money Jeff Bezos makes in a year, month, week, day, hour, minute, and second, BusinessInsider.com (Jan 9, 2020).

3 Phil McCausland, Trump administration proposals could cause millions to lose food stamps, NBC News (Nov. 30, 2019) (discussing proposed changes to SNAP program that would impose stricter work requirements, cap deductions for utility allowances and 'reform' the way states automatically enroll families when they receive other aid).  See also

4. See, e.g., Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich (2012) (described in The Guardian book review as "a necessary and at times depressing book about the staggeringly wealthy").  Freeland is neither Marxist nor socialist, and as I am reading the book, not evenappropriately skeptical of the amount of merit behind the plutocrats' self-claimed meritocracy.

Both the rich and ordinary Americans misunderstand their economic interests

There is class warfare going on, right now, all across this country.  It's highlighted by the election gimmicks and gambits of those on the right who claim to be supporting ordinary Americans but whose real intentions show in the results. And it is ultimately a sad statement about Americans' understanding of what is required for a sustainable economy that supports decent lifestyles for all.

Let's start by looking at the maps resulting from studies of well-being that identify the states where people are not at all well-off, such as the 2013 survey done by Gallup Healthways, available here.  Those poor states are the reddest of the red belt in Mississippi, Tennessee, Florida and elsewhere across the Deep South--places where I grew up in a decidedly Republican household that bought the GOP economic fallacies hook, line and sinker, and places where today's populations are worse off in terms of the various measures of economic well-being and happiness than the more progressive northeast and west.  

Isn't it likely that the anti-government, low-tax and pro-wealthy/pro-big business policies of the GOP politicos that have run these states for several decades have something to do with these negative results, and that the more progressive policies in the northeast and northwest are reflected in the much more positive results in those areas? 

Yet rural, southern populations continue to proudly proclaim their allegiance, against their own economic interest,  to ill-fated Reaganomics that favors tax cuts (for the wealthy and big business) coupled with  use of  old-time, regressive consumption taxes (toll roads, sales taxes and property taxes),  privatization of public functions (e.g., charter schools managed by for-profit, nontransparent corporations), socialization of losses, militarization, and de-regulation. 

The results are harmful at national and state levels, as those same right-leaning voters suffer from poor K-12 education, low-quality public services including neglected roadways, nonexistent or outdated public transportation systems, inferior safety nets, inferior health results, lower literacy rates, higher teenage birth rates, less access to universities, and, yes, fewer and lower-paying jobs.

Of course, those in the top 5% like to think of themselves as suffering, and therefore see any demands for increased minimum wages (that they consider cutting into their ability to capture more and more (rentier)  profits beyond their already unreasonable percentages) as "class warfare."  See, for instance, this Wall Street Journal video "Do You Make $400,000 a Year But Feel Broke?" from September 5, 2014 depicting the purported hard times for a couple in Chicago making $400,000 a year, buying a $60,000 car every four years, paying a mortgage on a $1.2 million house along with $25,000 a year in maintenance and , entertainment ($10,000 a year) going on vacations ($25,000 a year), club dues ($12,000 a year), and paying for their children's sports ventures ($10,000 a year). These and other  "necessities" and (purportedly reasonable) discretionary expenditures take all of their after-tax money. 

Given that perspective, no wonder those in the top have so little consideration and sympathy for ordinary Americans who have incomes in the $50,000 to $60,000 range, much less for the poor who struggle to put food on the table and heat in the furnace!  They can't even imagine such limited lives. With the growing inequality in this country, the gap between the upper class and the rest of us is increasingly wider.

The broad trend is clear from a diverse set of data. Median household income growth has badly lagged per capita GDP growth, corporate profits as a share of national income have risen, and stock markets have reached record highs.

Outside the sphere of political debate, you also see the real world impact of inequality. Merrill Lynch recommends an investment strategy to its clients based on the growing economic clout of plutocrats, Singapore Airlines is now selling $18,400 first class cabin tickets, and observers think Apple is going to start selling a $10,000 watch. Conversely, Walmart is now primarily worried about competition from dollar stores. The executives at these companies are not hysterical liberals trying to drum up paranoia about inequality, they are trying to respond to real economic conditions — conditions that have entailed very poor wage growth paired with decent returns for those proserous enough to own lots of shares of stock.

 Matt Iglesias, Vox.

The ability to care about those so distant from the well-heeled in-group appears to be diminishing as the gap between the well-heeled and the rest of us widens.  Those super-wealthy corporate managers and CEOs and super-rich shareholders are not likely to recognize in themselves the greed and exploitation of others that their excess returns on capital represent.  As Mitt Romney made so clear, rich folks (i) think of themselves as "meriting" their outsized incomes, in spite of the fact that they often start out with silver spoons and garner greater returns than ordinary folks simply because they have larger capital portfolios to start with and can't possible achieve a level of productivity of 100s times that of ordinary workers, as current CEO pay-levels claim under "free market" theory; and (ii) find it much easier to blame the misfortune of ordinary Americans on their purported laziness and "lack of personal responsibility."  (See earlier Taxing Matter posts on Romney's self-justifying 47% remarks during his presidential campaign.)

But that means the rich (and the GOP most closely aligned with big business and big capital) often support policies that can only lead to greater income and wealth inequality, fewer and fewer Americans able to enjoy a decent, sustainable lifestyle, and the growth of a very small oligarchic elite.  Those policies include making it harder for poor people to vote (justified on the basis of non-existent voter fraud), making it harder for middle class and poor people to go to college (less state monies to universities, less grants and more (profitable-for-big-banks) loans), making it harder to support a family (less public transportation, lower wages, more jobs outsourced, refusal to fund Medicaid expansion, yammering for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act even though the US's market-based health care system is less efficient, more costly, and lower quality than single-payer systems in most other advanced countries), etc.  The long-run result of these pro-elite pro-corporate policies may well be social chaos, as the rich oligarchy faces off against a suffering and shrinking middle class and a grievously disadvantaged lower class.  That may not be so far away as many of us once thought, given the rapidly growing wealth inequality and the more radical right-wing policies that have moved into the GOP mainstream in the form of Rand Paul and other free-marketarian extremists who denigrate government and want to remove the social-economic safety nets put in place under the New Deal.

They denigrate government, that is, except when they recognize that they need it, such as when the ebola crisis erupted.  Suddenly, they want a Center for Disease Control that really functions well, even though they have pushed government spending down. And they want a TSA that can screen arriving passengers, even though they hated the TSA before.  And they wanted the President to appoint an "Ebola Czar", even though they scoffed at the idea of administrative officials appointed to oversee important areas before.  They want a vaccine for ebola, but they have made it much harder to accomplish because of their constant push for "reducing government" and cutting research funding (making one of their pet projects to seek out what they think are silly projects that have been funded by the federal agencies).

The free market, in other words, is claimed to be the be all and end all -- until push comes to shove and it is obvious that market forces require government intervention.

Consider the compaign for governor here in Michigan.  In his ads, current GOP governor Rick Snyder claims to be a hands-on non-partisan fiscally responsible type who cares about everybody in Michigan.  Those ads brag about how Snyder cares about senior citizens and education --using the (meager) increases in "meals on wheels" to claim that Snyder has made life better for senior citizens, and the state's increase in support for purportedly public charter schools.  Behind that facade of political PR is a deeply partisan governor who has consistently supported the elite rich capitalists over the majority of Michiganders who are ordinary salary earners working hard (or working hard to find work).

• Snyder signed a "free rider/right to freeload" bill permitting non-union workers in a unionized environment to free-ride on union contracts without paying their share of the costs of the contracts they benefit from and prohibiting unions from using paycheck deductions to collect union dues.  That kind of legislation, sought by the elite owners of capital who benefit from paying lower non-union wages, is (mis)labelled by the pro-wealthy right as "right to work".  It is really a "right to freeload" law since the union rules it replaces never required anyone to join a union and always allowed workers who benefitted from a collective bargaining agreement to pay only the 'fair share' payment of the considerable costs of negotiating an agreement and supporting workers in grievances rather than support all union activities.  As a result, workers can now pay nothing yet call on the union whenever they have a grievance against their employer.  The goal of such laws is to eliminate union support for workers and thereby increase the power of capital owners, so it is particularly sad to see how many workers are fooled into supporting these "right to freeload" laws.
• Snyder supported Michigan legislation that gave big businesses a huge tax cut, while supporting another bill that gave seniors a huge tax increase by taxing their (often meager) pensions.  No wonder the wealthy who own most of the financial assets in the country and benefit from the decades of lobbying by right-wing propaganda tanks against buinsess and capital taxation think he's a good friend. 
• And of course, much of Snyder's 'support' for education has been cuts to state funding for Michigan universities (especially Wayne State, which serves the predominately Democratic southeastern region of the state) that has affected the state's economy in real ways, as students have to pay more of the cost and universities have less funding for research that directly impacts economic development.  Snyder has also supported an unprecedented increase in charter schools in a system that provides no accountability, doesn't provide improved educational results, and siphons off public dollars for private profits, through the mechanism of private charter management corporations that run the purportedly "public" charter schools.
• Snyder doesn't think we need increases in the minimum wage, and his administration has generally shown little interest in figuing out how to help minimum wage workers revive from the Great Recession.  For example, his administration has done nothing to deal with the myriad fly-by-night companies that cheat workers coming and going on wages. 

ASIDE:   Here's one real-life tale illustrating the problem.   I know personally of a man in Michigan hired by a Michigan-registered cleaning corporation that had contracts with at least  two major national corporations to clean stores in southeast Michigan.  The cleaning company claimed that the man was "in training" and therefore not required to be compensated after two weeks of full-time working for the company, including being locked inside a cavernous store overnight to do a major cleaning job. The company refused to pay for the next two weeks, claiming that "corporate headquarters" had made an error and would straighten it out in the next paycheck a month later.  The man ultimately was paid only  a couple of hundred dollars for that entire month, because the company  produced a purported check stub showing a paycheck even when the man representing the company acknowledge that paycheck had never been issued to the man.  The company paid the man on a "piecework" basis for cleaning stores, claiming that a 30,000 square foot store with public restrooms could and should be cleaned for $25(that's mopping, vacuuming, and cleaning toilets) and that the work could be done in one hour!  The company required the man to pick up cleaning equipment and the company van at the "corporate headquarters" (many miles from his home and many miles from each of the stores to be cleaned) but claimed that it did not have to pay the man for the 3-4 hours per day that he had to spend to drive the company van and equipment to and from various worksites.   The man quit, but has never gotten the company to issue the paycheck that he never received and has never received pay for the many hours spent working for the company moving its van and equipment.  

 

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Mark Thoma puts Holtz-Eakin on (figurative) hot seat

As most of the ataxingmatter readers know, I do not frequently applaud the economic punditry of those freshwater economists who think the way to deal with the problem of failed market fundamentalism policies is to double-down on those failed policies. 

I've noted that we tried that already.  We doubled down on  reaganomics policies of tax cuts/militarization/deregulation/& privatization throughout the Bush regime, and that got us into a witch's brew of problems. 

Because of that double-down mentality, where the neos told us war was good and greed was good and where we applied the laughable, made-up-out-of-whole-cloth "Laffer theory" that told us there was no evil that tax cuts (especially for the rich and big corporations) couldn't conquer, the Bush regime very ably turned a budget surplus into a staggering deficit and a financil crisis that would guarantee more deficits and debt before we were done with it. 

We ended up with failed (de)regulatory policies.  They allowed Big Banks and their big moneymakers to speculate their way into phantom billions of profits (all soaked up by the big jefes/big moneymakers).  But instead, we got a near-breakdown of the financial system, that forced all us ordinary taxpayers to subsidize the Big Banks' losses without getting recompense from the banksters' earlier oversized payouts. 

We ended up with failed tax (cut) policies.  They cut taxes on big multinational corporations and the ultra rich, based on the claim that those are the "job creators" that we should reward.  But instead  they only ended up siphoning off needed revenues from programs that could build infrastructure and support quality education and research.  They privatized education by providing lots of federal loan money to students that went to for-profit schools, only to learn that those schools tend to be traps that don't educate but just take money for the profit of the "education" business.  They quit funding the stuff we need, so they could subsidize those that didn't need it.  And they kept the subsidy up--for Big Oil, for wealthy decedents--even when the money was just piling on for those that already had lots of it.

That's what makes the current ultra-partisan Congress and the constant right-wing talk of deficits and debt as justification for stripping the safety net (while still conferring outsize gains on the ultra rich and Big Business) so disgusting.  The right still  refuses to pay attention to facts and justifies this oft-discredited, clearly wrong-headed market-fundamentalist and class-warfare orthodoxy as "plain as day" correct thinking. 

ASIDE:  This seems sort of like the GOP's plans for gaining the loyalty of our increasing diverse electorate by being careful to package their mostly white, Friedman-orthodox, oligarchy-favoring policies in the sheep's clothing of multicultural spokespersons who avoid the "tell" of who they really are and use words that talk about ordinary people as though the policies were actually aimed at benefitting them.  Meanwhile they double-down on their claims that redistribution upward is all about job creation, and condemn those who talk about preserving the safety net by NOT reducing benefits as "socialists" who don't understand the American way. 

The American way they seem to be harking to is the era of the corporate titans of malfeasance that Teddy Roosevelt warned us against, who grabbed the gains of the market place well in excess of their productivity merit and didn't give a damn about the rest of us. (Take Leland Stanford and the building of the great western railroads, subsidized by vast land grants and other programs from the federal government.  Stanford was quite willing to let the Chinamen he hired to use their explosive expertise to carve out railroad tunnels live in hunger because he withheld their pay and die because of inadequate safety , but meanwhile he lived a life of luxury supported by his corporate structure that sent all the money supported by the government subsidies his way and none of it theirs.)

Douglas Holtz-Eakin is a prime example of doubling down on failed policies by ignoring the facts of recent experience.  See Holtz-Eakin, We have to get US government spending under control, guardian.co.uk (Feb. 14, 2013).  Mark Thoma does a good job of putting him on the hot seat and telling it like it really is.  Read it at Holtz-Eakin Tries to Scare You. Don't Let Him, Economist's View (Feb. 14, 2013).  Here's an excerpt

Holtz-Eakin (in the Guardian essay): "Debt reduction produces jobs and better economic growth."

Mark Thoma (in the Economist's View take-down): "[R]eading that last line, he has learned nothing from the failure of the confidence fairy to appear.  Waiting to fix the debt--a problem driven mainly by health care cost escalation that won't become severe for many years--is not risky, but his advice certainly is."

***

Holtz-Eakin (in the Guardian essay): "Down with the orthodoxy.  It is time to get the deficit under control."

Mark Thoma (in the Economist's View take-down): "The notion that we are responding in the same way as in the 60s and 70s, and that we are faced [with] the same type of shock (that require[s] the same types of policies)--an oil price shock and other large supply-side distrubances from demography that we faced then--is wrong and he ought to know that."....."The 'pundit orthodoxy' he disses is from Paul Krugman.  Kind of funny, given how wrong Holtz-Eakin has been relative to Krugman ... but Krugman can speak for himself, and has, on how wrong the 'we're about to become Greece!!!' crowd has been.  There is, however, one thing he [Holtz-Eakin] is correct about.  Holtz-Eakin is right to say we shouldn't listen to some pundits, especially those like himself who have been so wrong about how events would unfold at every step along the way."

Holtz-Eakin does a lot more in the Guardian article that is just plain bad, such as claiming that the so-called  Affordable Care Act "entitlement" will contribute to the so-called "entitlement problem," which will contribute to the "serious" problem that the "deficit orthodoxy" won't acknowledge.  He then hammers on the right-wing orthodoxy's pet do-away-with-it-if-we-can projects--Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, suggesting that "serious debt reform" requires "serious entitlement reform."  

As I noted in another recent post, right-wingers like Holtz-Eakin love to talk about safety net programs as "entitlements", whereas they talk about entitlements for the rich and MNEs, such as the percentage depletion allowance, the preferential capital gains rate, and the various subsidies that have handed outsize profits to big banks as though they were rightfully merited acknowledgements of the good those institutions do the rest of us! The talk about these safety net programs, when entering into a right-winger's discussion of fiscal issues, is always lopsided.  It is always how we need to cut back on them, and never about how we need to consider if the programs are worthy, the funding currently provided needed or even currently inadequate, and, if the answer is yes, what means make sense, in a sustainable democracy to serve the people, to ensure the ongoing viability of the safety net.  Not reducing benefits but increasing revenues and decreasing rent-profit-taking. 

So  Holtz-Eakin fails to acknowledge that actually the Affordable Care Act is a first step in addressing otherwise mushrooming health care costs which occur because we treat health care as a ripe field for rent-seekers to make rentier profits rather than acknowledging (like other advanced countries) that health care is at least a quasi-public good that must be heavily regulated to ensure accessibility.  And like all the right-wingers pushing the hand-wringing worry over deficits for which their own policies are the primary cause, Holtz-Eakin suggests that the core of what we have to do is, quelle surpise, "spending cuts and deficit control", since "doing nothing or worse, increasing spending, is a profoundly anti-growth strategy."

This is the doubling-down on failed policy orthodoxy that Americans should reject out of hand.  Spending cuts and efforts at "deficit control" that focus on taking away health care and pension benefits from retirees and others dependent on the safety net are perfect prescriptions for disaster.  We aren't Greece.  But if the right-wingers like Holtz-Eakin get their way, we will be.

 

Related articles

The Inequality Gap

Noted for February 15, 2013

An Orthodoxy of One

Douglas Holtz-Eakin Stops Being an Economist

Welfare Spending: Medicare vs Corporate/Business Subsidies (or does the GOP really support WalMart's behavior in Bangladesh?)

As most readers know, the federal government is currently in what passes for negotiations between the President's Democratic Party Senate and House members and the GOP members that control the House. 

The Tea Party and its right-wing rhetoric has of course had a radicalizing impact on the GOP positions, with members not only beholden to Grover Norquist and his anti-tax pledge (all strongly supported by various right-wing propaganda tanks like the Tax Foundation, Heritage, American Enterprise, and other organizations) but also to the anti-social welfare corporatists like David and Charles Koch, the Wal-Mart heirs, and other oligarchic families that constitute the top 1% of US income and wealth.  As a result of these two strong influences, the GOP now stands for

• tax-cuts-no-matter-what (and for tax cuts that benefit the wealthy most of all, as reflected in the rigid position in favor of the "carried interest" scam used by private equity profits partners and the extraordinarily preferential rate for capital gains and dividends included in the "net capital gain" definition under section 1(h)(11)); and
• so-called "entitlement reforms", by which GOPers generally mean reduction in benefits and/or privatization of social welfare programs including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  (All of this is argued in terms of caring about "saving" the programs for the future, but the truth lies in the ways that the right proposes changes to the programs--not changes in costs related to profits taken out by Big Pharma and similar interests, but changes in benefits to ordinary Americans (such as raising the working age for eligibility even though those who work at the hardest labor need benefits earlier, not later, or lowering the cost-of-living-allowance adjustment to benefits for Medicare, even though seniors generally have a HIGHER cost of living because of their increased medical needs, including prescription drugs for diabetes, high blood pressure, and similar diseases particularly prevalent in the elderly population.)

The sum of those positions stands for a corporatist philosophy of benefitting the oligarchy and their business enterprises at the expense of everyday Americans who work for a living.

This is even more obvious when one looks at the same groups' position on government subsidies for business.  The New York Times recently ran an article on this issue, noting that governments typically pay out a lot of money to support profits of companies and receive very little benefit in terms of tax revenues received and jobs created!  Louise Story, As companies seek tax deals, governments pay high price, New York Times (Dec. 1, 2012).

Over at MauledAgain, one of my fellow tax professors Jim Maule has, like me, long criticized the hypocrisy of supporting tax breaks for private enterprise and opposing earned benefits programs for ordinary citizens and has repeatedly pointed out that the economics of the tax breaks for business don't work out for anybody but the owners and managers of the businesses.  They certainly don't work for taxpayers of the jurisdiction providing them.  As Jim notes:

 These tax breaks are nothing more than welfare payments to private enterprise. Opponents of social welfare spending defend these outlays with as much passion as they bring to their attempts to end government assistance for individuals in need of help.James Maule, The Hidden Government Spending Game, MauledAgain (Dec. 5, 2012).

Jim rebuts one of the sham arguments for corporate subsidies--that they are just "keeping what belongs to them."  Those special subsidies to one private enterprise sector cause ripple effects throughout the economy--higher taxes to the other taxpayers to make up for the lost revenues, or cuts in important programs that can no longer be sustained without the revenues.  Prices and wages may change as well.  Id.

What I want to focus on is the hypocrisy of claiming an interest in ending "entitlements" but applying that philosophy only to programs that are intended to help ordinary citizens and not to those intended to beef up the profits of corporations or their managers and owners.  This is especially hypocritical for today's right-wing, since they almost universally claim to ascribe to the view that competition is good and that businesses should fail when they cannot successfully compete. 

Look at two cases involving WalMart, a multinational enterprise that fights unionization of its employees (and supports right-to-work laws that weaken worker rights) in every way imaginable.

1) In Champlain Illinois (personal experience), WalMart had a huge spralling complex on one side of the road.  It had gotten various tax support for the complex.  It decided to move across the road and down the block into another jurisdiction.  It got new tax subsidies there.  It abandonned the old building and left whatever environmental pollution there.  Who gained?  Mostly WalMart managers and owners.  Not the town and counties.  Not the employees.  Not even the consumers who shopped there, who had to deal with the blight of the abandonned building and the multiplication of vast expanses of ugly parking lots.

2) WalMart in Bangladesh.   WalMart delivers cheap goods because it outsources its clothing and other manufacturing needs to impoverished countries where workers can be paid almost nothing and get almost no protections.  In Bangladesh last month, a clothing factory burned, killing hundreds of workers.  It was a WalMart supplier. See  Natasha Leonard, WalMart's Connection to Bangladesh Clothing Factory, Salon.com (Nov. 26, 2012), where a critic noted that:

"Wal-Mart is supporting, is incentivizing, an industry strategy in Bangladesh: extreme low wages, non-existent regulation, brutal suppression of any attempt by workers to act collectively to improve wages and conditions." Id.

This was a modern-day repeat of the Triangle Shirt Factory incident in the early nineteenhundreds in New York City:  workers unable to escape burned to death in factory rooms without fire exits and yet dangerously littered with lint and other debris that made their workplace a fire hazard. 

WalMart, in fact, has led the fight against workers' rights and spending on safety at that factory and others.  See Natasha Leonard,  WalMart wouldn't pay for Bangladeshi factory safety improvements, Salon.com (Dec. 6, 2012). 

These things are all tied together: hostility to workers rights to bargain collectively for some fair share of the productivity gains that their labor brings about, hostility to workers rights to a safe working place; hostitlity to workers rights to decent health care; hostility to ordinary people's rights to a sustainable lifestyle; and hostility to any effort to make the oligarchic uber-rich pay a fair share of the costs of the infrastructure to sustain an economy and a people.

Tax policy, spending policy, policy towards workers, policy towards the wealthy uber-rich--these are all closely intertwined and must be considered of a piece.  Tax policy needs to establish reasonable levels of contributions based on a progressive income tax that takes into account the marginal utility of the dollar.  Spending policy needs to set priorities based on something other than the lobbying by special corporate and oligarch interests for tax-and-spending provisions that privilege themselves.    Policy towards labor rights and workplace safety need to recognize that the worker is disemplowered within the workplace and needs some legal support to provide a reasonable share of productivity gains--minimum wage laws, unionization laws, workers safety laws need to protect workers rights against the all-powerful employer.

If the right succeeds in continuing to pass right-to-work laws (Michigan's lame duck GOP is trying to do that right now), if the oligarchs succeed in capturing all the profits from workers' labor--there will be social unrest on the scale of the Great Depression.  Everybody will suffer from that kind of austerity and class warfare policy.  Broad based economic growth that comes from workers sharing in the profits of their industry and those at the top not getting an unreasonable share of the productivity gains is better for all. 

Related articles

Wal-Mart, Sears Must Put Out Fires in Bangladesh Factories: View - Bloomberg

Walmart rejected safety upgrades at Asia factory where 100 die in fire

Five Wal-Mart Vendors Made Clothes at Burned Bangladesh Factory

Bangladesh factory owner: I didn't know fire exits were needed

The Poverty of Nations: Wal-Mart Efficiency and The Destitution of America

Jon Takes On Wal-Mart, Hostess

Wal-Mart Said 'No' to Paying for Fire Safety in Bangladesh

More on the Threat to Social Security and Medicare from the so-called "Fiscal Cliff"

In several posts recently I have discussed the harmful demands the right is engaging in related to the so-called "fiscal cliff" created by the original Bush tax cuts (set to sunset en masse), the artificial debt ceiling (used by the GOP to exact promises of spending cuts during a recession along with extension of unneeded tax cuts for the rich), and the ill-conceived notion that the U.S. military should continue to be funded at dangerously high levels that (i) ensure that the military-industrial complex will find a war or quasi-war in which to engage their newest toys while (ii) sucking resources from public infrastructure projects and education that are vitally needed to sustain our economy.  See, e.g., The GOP's extortion demands: cut Social Security or we'll shoot; If the Dems got backbone; Is it a fiscal cliff or merely a bump in the road; We face an 'austerity crisis' not a 'fiscal cliff. 

A. The Explanation.

At least the national media and a slew of bloggers are beginning to provide some background information to ordinary Americans on just what is driving the national discussion of "fiscal cliffs" and "austerity" demands.  See, e.g., Richard Rubin & Heidi Przybyla, Tax Pledges Confound Math as Obama Seeks Deal with Republicans, Bloomberg.com (Nov. 16, 2012) (noting that "The $607 billion fiscal cliff is the combination of tax increases and spending cuts that will take effect in January if Congress doesn’t act" and characterizing the positions of the parties as follows: "Republicans want to extend expiring tax cuts for all income levels and are demanding an overhaul in 2013 of entitlement programs and the tax code" while "Obama wants $1.6 trillion in higher taxes for top earners over the next decade, achieved through a combination of limits on breaks and higher tax rates on ordinary income, capital gains, dividends and estates"); Jackie Calmes, Demystifying the Fiscal Impasse that is Vexing Washington, New York Times (Nov. 16, 2012), at A19 (the online article is dated Nov. 15). 

[A] slew of tax cuts — $400 billion for 2013 — expire on Dec. 31: All of the Bush-era rate reductions; smaller tax cuts that periodically expire for businesses and individuals; and the 2-percentage-point cut in payroll taxes that Mr. Obama pushed in 2010....  Also, 28 million taxpayers — about one in five, all middle- to upper-income — would have to pay the alternative minimum tax in 2012.... That is because Congress has failed to pass an inflation adjustment....

***

An emergency unemployment-compensation program is expiring, which would save $26 billion but end payments to millions of Americans who remain jobless and have exhausted state tax benefits.

Medicare payments to doctors would be reduced 27 percent, or $11 billion, because this year Congress has not passed the usual so-called 'doc fix' to block the cuts....

The biggest cut would be $65 billion, enacted across the board for most federal programs over the last nine months of fiscal year 2013, from January through September.  This cut, known as the sequester, was mandated by an August 2011 budget deal between [President] Obama and Congress that ended [the GOP] standoff over raising the nation's debt limit.   Demystifying the Fiscal Impasse that is Vexing Washington

It is surely accurate that our still-weak economy would do better if we do not hit it too hard with decreases in government spending--especially decreases to government spending that supports the most vulnerable amongst us who need unemployment support in order to provide the basic necessities.  Similarly, it is surely true that some of the Bush tax cuts and the Obama payroll tax reduction are still vitally important to those in the lower 60% or so of the income distribution because of the slow growth in the economy.  We will want to find some resolution to the situation that accommodates the need to avoid a harmful austerity approach.

So the Times' explanation of the components of the so-called "fiscal cliff" is okay.  And it is reasonable in noting that the situation is currently "vexing" to Washington.  Similarly, the Bloomberg article succinctly characterizes the clear poles of the Democratic and Republican positions--a Democratic insistence on higher taxes paid by the rich, and a Republican insistence on so-called "tax reform" and spending cuts, aimed in particular at the earned benefit and safety net programs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. 

B. A Grand Bargain or a Devil's Bargain--How the Heck Did Social Security Even Get In the Picture?

Where the Times article fails is in its discussion of the "reasons"  for excessive worry about the "fiscal cliff" (if one can really call the GOP recalcitrance to immediately pass an extension of at least a good portion of the Bush tax cuts for individual taxpayers in the true middle class any form of reason).  

The Times article asserts that the "main disagreement" between Dems and Republicans is merely the question of extending the Bush tax rates for the top 2 percent of taxpayers.  That is a considerable understatement, one that results in part from the way the media reduces complex issues to easily retained soundbites, in that it ignores the considerable disagreement about whether and to what extent there should be any changes at all to the various earned benefit programs. 

The  article author appears to operate on an unstated assumption that because President Obama seemed ready to trade off changes in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits for higher taxes on the very richest of the rich in August of 2011, he will still enter into such a "Grand Bargain" to avoid the so-called "fiscal cliff."  Progressives hope, at least, that Obama will not fall prey to those same conclusions: Obama is now in a position of considerable leverage, and he must recognize that he cannot allow the Democrats to be extorted into a Devil's Bargain to reduce Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare benefits in exchange for the pittance of slightly higher taxes on the upper crust.

The article goes even further astray at the end with its label of a "two-part deal" as the "best-case outcome".  It claims that "[m]any budget experts and economists are hoping for a two-part deal.  The first part would extend many of the tax cuts and repeal the automatic spending cuts to avert the changes scheduled after Jan. 1.  But it would be contingent on the second part: a framework for reducing projected long-term deficits by overhauling both the tax code--to raise revenues--and entitlement programs--chiefly Medicare and Medicaid, whose rising costs in an aging population are unsustainable."  Id.

Of course, here the "many" is simply put out there without any context, so one can't challenge the statement as accurate or inaccurate.  The right-wing has a stable of market fundamentalist economists who want to see earned benefit programs reduced, and there are certainly the Blue-Dog Dems and a number of others (like the Bowles Simpson group) who go along with that with little questioning of the ultimate negative impact on quality of life and decency of those determinations.  Overall, there is considerable parroting of the right-wing rhetoric that suggests that these vitally important programs have to be overhauled, rather than recognizing that it is the factors that lead to ever-increasing costs for medical care in the United States that must be addressed.  And it mistakenly suggests that there is a consensus in that regard. This is a perfect example of the way today's journalists buy into the rhetoric that is promoted (at great expense) without questioning the fundamental presuppositions underlying it.  In fact, the sequester deal did not touch Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid because there was no consensus that these programs should be reduced.  And the election results demonstrate that there is no consensus now that these program benefits must be reduced, though there is likely a consensus that health care costs in this country are increasing well beyond what is reasonable.  It is absolutely critical that the distinction be made.

So let's take these issues into consideration here.

C. Thinking about the two key components of the so-called "fiscal cliff"--tax cuts and spending cuts.

1. The Bush tax cuts, job creators, and uncertainty

The right has, not unexpectedly, argued that not extending all of the tax cuts--including those that amount to significant dollars for the wealthiest upper crust--will create a dire situation since, the right argues, the wealthy are the "job creators".  There is no empirical evidence supporting the idea that tax cuts for the upper crust do anything to create jobs: most jobs are created by small businesses, and those with incomes above $250,000 make up only about 3% of small businesses. 

Others argue that the uncertainty of letting the Bush tax cuts expire on December 31 is itself a dire blow to the economy.  But in the same breath, the media and most members of the Democratic and Republican parties acknowledge that they do not disagree on the need to extend the tax cuts for the middle income group at this time--the Democrats because they recognize that the tax cuts are still needed at a time of continuing slow growth out of the Great Recession caused by the profligate regulatory and tax policies of the Bush years, and the GOP because they recognize that they have no opportunity for an electoral majority if they continue to ignore the middle class. 

Thus,  savvy political advisers note that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire and then enacting judiciously selected tax cuts targeted at the middle class (perhaps similar to the Bush tax cuts for the lower income groups or perhaps more carefully selected and without the many corporate tax giveaways) are fairly sure things, so that the arguments from uncertainty reduce to the same-old right-wing scare tactics.

2. The sequester, military spending, health care costs, and the importance of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid

Some conclude that neither side wants the sequester, with its domestic spending cuts and military cost-cutting, to go into place.  This, too, may be incorrect and overly simplistic. 

Many progressives recognized that we have a substantial imbalance in spending, in which we neglect public infrastructure (roads, bridges, public transportation especially rail and inter-and intra-city rail) and human capital development (funding for public education and for basic research) while pushing money at the military-industrial complex.  The latter step merely encourages the military to find ways to use the military investment it makes--i.e., more money essentially fosters war-mongering simply by providing plenty of the tools to carry it out through exorbitant expenditures on the military.  Letting the sequester take place is probably the only way that our dysfunctional Congress--with far-right-wing/Tea Party dominance in the House and the minority-control rule through the filibuster in the Senate--will be able to undo the disastrous emphasis on military spending above everything else that began with Reaganomics.  

Accordingly, a better course might be to let the sequester take hold, too, and then selectively undo cuts that jeopardize sound government--such as cuts to research, centers for disease control, public transportation, public infrastructure, education, and funding of public pension obligations.  Surely the right recognizes that Americans are not happy when lax regulation results in deaths from medical care because Congress was lobbied out of regulating compounding pharmacies or deaths from bridge collapse because Congress refused to spend sufficiently on upgrading our antique transportation infrastructure or continually falling behind in research on Alzheimers and cancer and the many other modern afflictions because Congress has been so stingy with federal funds supporting basic research at our research universities.

OF course, we know from the election that today's GOP sees no problem with cuts to various domestic programs that the Dems (and many ordinary Americans) hold dear--the right's admitted goal since Reagan has been to reduce the size of government, on the ill-founded belief in market fundamentalism that private markets can do everything better.  

But we have years of evidence that disproves that belief, and progressives must start publicizing the absurdity of the right's claims about market fundamentalism and the right's denials about basic scientific theory.  Climate change is real, and investments will be required to protect our great cities.  Social Security is not bankrupt, and there is no reason that it cannot continue for years (even indefinitely) without reducing benefits.  Markets like medical care simply don't work without governmental intervention because Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Med (especially for-profit hospitals, nursing homes but also too highly compensated doctors combined with too lowly compensated aides and other assistants) exercise near-monolithic control of access and pricing, rendering the health care "market" dysfunctional, and government intervention will be required to create health-care delivery systems that serve the people. 

(Even those who ascribe to Milt Friedman's views of how markets work--views which in my view are based on unrealistic and overly simplistic assumptions that leave out most of the truth of human behavior in order to arrive at neatly mathematical formulas--recognize problems with the health care market where physicians operate in a structure of monopolistic competition.  In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman noted that state licensing acts as a barrier to entry that gives physicians considerable market control, thus resulting in rent profits.  Friedman's market fundamentalism solution would be to allow anyone to practice medicine without a license, thus creating consumer "choice."  Query whether anyone without considerable wealth would actually prefer a return to those "quack" days of frontier medicine where such a market existed or would rather have a version of today's regulated system of health care professionals with both affordability and competence. I argue that the latter is both preferable and attainable.  See below.)

The following provides some of the factual evidence for the importance of government intervention in the medical care market--European and Canadian health care, which are generally forms of government single-payer or single-payer/single-provider care, and Medicare, which is a form of government single-payer care, are both considerably less costly and substantially more universal in coverage than the standard, private market U.S. medical care model.   See, e.g., the OECD's comparative statistics on medical care provision in the US compared to OECD countries and Canada, available here (see statistical spreadsheet here).

Total Healh Care Spending Per Person, 2010: US (8233); OECD avg (3268); CA (4445)

Total Health Care Spending* as Share of GDP, 2010: US (17.6); OECD avg (9.5); CA (11.4)

Pharmaceutical Expenditure* Per Person, 2010: US (983); OECD avg (496); CA (741)

Practicing Physicians Per 1000 Population, 2010: US (2.4); OECD avg (3.1); CA (2.4)

Practicing Nurses Per 1000 Population, 2010: US (11.0); OECD avg (8.7); CA (9.3)

Physician Consultations Per Person, 2010: US (3.9); OECD (6.4); CA (5.5)

Medical Graduates Per 100000 Population, 2010: US (6.6); OECD (10.3); CA (7.2)

*expressed in dollars adjusted for purchasing power parities (rates of currency conversion that equalise the cost of a given 'basket' of goods and services in different countries)

The U.S. medical care market's high costs are attributable to a variety of factors, but perhaps the most significant is the potential for "rent" profits to Big Med, Big Pharm, and Big Insurance. 

Note that the right's "reaganomics" rhetoric has been that we have to reduce the size of government by cutting government costs specifically for the social justice programs that serve a majority of our citizens, particularly in their old age.  The right's most important priority for reductions in government services, that is, are reductions to the earned benefit programs that it calls "entitlements" (a term that it does not extend to the various tax expenditures that provide all kinds of gravy for the upper crust and multinational corporations like Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Banks, etc.).  The right wants to reduce the deficit on the hides of the poor, the elderly and those who have little besides Social Security and Medicare for retirement (because of their reasonable reliance on their availability to buffer the viscisitudes of private markets in their old age).  So the right proposes either privatizing ("voucherizing" Medicare; "optionalizing" Social Security) or shifting programs to the States (where reductions in Medicaid funding for the poor can be hidden more easily) and/or reducing benefits by increasing the age for eligibility and decreasing potential payments.  In other words, the right treats a problem caused by the unduly high costs of a wacky, quasi-monopolistic, market-based medical care system as best solved not by bringing the costs down the way every other civilized peer nation has done, but instead by preventing the majority of Americans from having access to decent medical care if they are poor or old and dying or physically handicapped or otherwise unable to afford private insurance.

 *****

After all, as Robert Reich argues, the "fiscal cliff" and "looming budget deficits" aren't the worst of our problems. 

The central problem of our economy is widening inequality. It's reducing the purchasing power of the vast middle class on which job growth depends, and turning the economy into a speculative casino for multimillionaires and billionaires.  It's also undermining our ability to turn the economy around, as those millionaires and billionaires subsidize politicians who refuse to raise taxes on the wealthy and seek to cut spending critical to the middle class and the poor.  Robert Reich, Stop income inequality!, Salon.com (Nov. 15, 2012) (formatting changed).

The more I think about this, the more I am convinced that, as Kenneth Thomas says, Democrats Should Just Sit Back and Ride Over the Fiscal Cliff (in a post at Middle Class Political Economist, republished on BusinessInsider.com, here). 

[The fiscal cliff] is the combination of spending cuts and tax increases set to take place on January 1 based on several different laws.  Estimates of the consequences run as high as $800 billion next year, or 5.2% of the country's $15.29 trillion gross domestic product in 2011.  Yes, that would mean a recession, with obvious consequences for the middle class.  But this is only true if we did nothing after January 1, and that's not going to happen.  Id.

The right-wing's "breadwinner conservatism"--starve the state; support traditional families (only)

Many of us who think about tax and economic policy have been confounded by the tendency of lower-middle-class families to vote Republican, which means they are ultimately voting against their own economic interests for a party that wants all the benefits of the federal government to accrue to the already wealthy, and sets policies to ensure that is true, from tax cuts to capital gains, estate taxes and progressive rates (all favoring the wealthy) to the kinds of subsidies represented by the "active busienss exception" that allows tax free reorganizations to move business assets and jobs out of the country without any tax "toll" on the departure.

Michelle Goldberg , a Newsweek and Daily Beast writer, provides some answers to this mystery in her review of Robert Self, "All in the family: The realighment of American Democracy since the 1960s" Hill & Wang (2012) in The Nation (Oct. 22, 2012), at 32.  While she finds the Self book lacking in the in-depth analysis that would make it not only a great read but also a revealing informational source on the changes in the American polity, she does note  the  label he attaches to the right-wing resurgence ("breadwinner conservatism") as an apt descriptor of the way social traditionalism--opposition to gay rights; eagerness to encourage governmental support of fundamentalist Christian dogmas and impose them on others; belief that the only kind of family that should receive government subsidies and support are those with a mother (ideally non-working), breadwinner father and children--intersects with radical market fundamentalism and its "starve the beast" approach to government.  Instead of the paradox that liberals sense between"values" voting and market fundamentalist economic theory that supports an oligarchy at odds with most of the "values" voters' economic self-interest, Self describes the way "social and economic conservatism buttress each other".  Id.

"[T]he defense of the autonomous, idealized nuclear family 'was intimately linked to the way [conservative activists] also sought to limit government interference in the private market," Self writes. Id. at 33.

Thus, when two women with children are paid about the same at their job in a daycare center but one is firmly in the middle class because she is married with a husband in a good job and the other is struggling on food stamps because she is not married, the attitudes of progressives and conservatives differ starkly on the remedies.  Progressives see this is a failure of the system to support all kinds of families and consider the right's denigration of the hardworking single mother as hypocrisy.  The right, however, believes that "encouraging traditional faimilies is of paramount social importance" so it is okay with a system that makes the lives of single mothers more difficult while rewarding more traditional mothers.  Because the right also dislikes any form of government intervention in the markets or government intervention that might upset the applecart regarding the dominance of traditional families (and traditional religious institutions), it wants to keep government small and ineffective, assuring that it does not provide public support such as "food stamps, subsidized daycare, and after-school programs" that would make life easier for single mothers.  As Paul ryan made clear in his "path to prosperity" budget plan, the right-wing prefers to undermine government because it wants nongovernmental institutions to determine who gets aid, and how.  When fundamentalist churches are the arbiters of aid, single women experience the shame and public ignominy that the right believes they deserve. 

Goldberg adds substance beyond what she finds in Self.  She notes that '[a]s long as big-government liberalism worked to uphold the nuclear family, it was supported by a fairly broad social consensus."  When traditional ideas about gender and about the innate heroism of the military started to fray in the 1960s and 1970s with feminism, gay rights, and sexual liberation, and calls for the end of patriarchy,  the right responded.  Radical anti-feminists like Phyllis Schlafly, notes Goldberg, saw feminists as "radicals who are waging a total assault on the family, on marriage, and on children."  George Gilder, radical anti-feminist and hardcore supply-sider who wrote many speeches for Reagan, "was upfront about opposing reproductive rights because he believed they undermined male power and about how his economic theories depended on women's submission. Goldberg quotes the following passage from Gilder:

 When the women demanded' control over our own bodies,' they believed they were couching the issue in the least objectionable way. ... But as Norman Mailer pointed out at the time, they were in fact invoking one of the most extreme claims of the movement and striking at one of the most profound male vulnerabilities.  For, in fact, few males have come to psycological terms with the existing birth-control technology; few recognize the extent to which it shifts the balance of sexual power in favor of women.  A man quite simply cannot now father a baby unless his wife is fully and deliberately agreeable. ... Male procreativity is now dependent, to a degree unprecedented in history, on the active pleasure of women."  Id. at 34 (quoting Reagan speechwriter George Gilder).

Goldberg concludes that "[t]he contemporary conservative movement has succeeded in part by painting the government as the ultimate cause of emasculation."  Id. at 34.  She suggests that Ryan's speech at the convention personified this view, arguing essentially that men who want more authority and control of their families and their destinies should battle the "suffocating power of the state" and beware of the problems when "government accords [privileges] to women or minorities or the poor".  Id. at 34.

Growing inequality calls for both "predistribution" and (rightly directed) redistribution

In putting forward my theme of democratic egalitarianism, I have often noted that there is no such thing as an economically egalitarian society--there will always be differentials among people, those differences often relate to social class and the education, privileged upbringing, and networking connections that ensure success for some and deny success to others as well as to innate abilities, so that those differences inevitably translate into some being better off economically than others.   

Because of those differences, the "powers that be"--i.e., existing concentrations of financial assets, prestige and associated political power among the privileged class at the very top of the income and wealth distribution-- result in redistribution upwards from poor and middle class to the upper crust.  And most in that privileged upper-crust think they've acquired it all on the basis of their own merit and that the reason others don't have it is because they are irresponsible, don't work hard enough, don't have a good business sense or are just incompetent. 

(That is of course the tale told by the like of Mitt Romney at his private fundraiser in Flordia, where he revealed his utter disdain for half of the US population and his self-indulging belief that he got where he is entirely on his own merit .  He can't even see, much less acknowledge, either his silver-spoon upbringing of class, wealth and connections or the various government-subsidized upwards redistribution from which he has benefited through capital gains preferences, carried interest treatment, disregard of the harm caused by his leveraged-buyout business model, and government subsidies through high-value government contracts and low-cost government loans.) 

Therefore, I have argued,  democratic institutions (government, programs, policies) must target achieving a sustainable economy that provides a decent livelihood for all.  They must also prevent inordinate inequality, because huge inequality among the citizenry foils all attempts to achieve either a sustainable economy or sustainable democratic institutions. 

That means that government policies must focus on creating paths for redistribution downwards from the upper crust to the middle and lower classes, undoing the corporatist top-down approach that has supported class warfare and allowed the wealthy to capture most of the productivity gains since Reagan's presidency.  Two government systems can work, on the margins, to achieve some level of downwards redistribution--benefits and taxes.  Benefits do so by providing a safety net under those most vulnerable who have never achieved a sustainable economic livelihood--the unemployed and unemployable, the sick, the elderly, the children who have poor schools, poor families, and inadequate shelter, nutrition and opportunity.  Taxes do so by taking more from those who have grabbed an inordinate portion of the resource pie and using those revenues to fund benefits as well as infrastructure (human and physical) that supports the efforts by ordinary Americans to achieve sustainable livelihoods.

We have been moving backwards on both of these systems.  The radical right has spent the last 30-40 years pushing an agenda that ultimately wants to (i) dismantle or radically reduce benefits programs (voucherizing medicare, privatizing social security, cutting back on unemployment, allowing states to reduce medicaid and children's health coverage, etc.) and (ii) eliminate taxes on corporations and the primary source of income of high-wealth individuals through a gradual reduction in progressive rate structure, elimination of the estate tax, elimination of capital gains taxes (and treatment of wealthy people's wages as though they were capital gains, through provisions like stock options and carried interest).  Paul Ryan's positions on Medicare and Social Security should be a clarion-call to get out the vote--against the Romney-Ryan ticket-- of every person who does not earn more than $300,000 a year.   The Norquist-Koch Brothers-Karl Rove-Ryan-Romney agenda on taxes should similarly cause ordinary Americans who earn less than $300,000 a year to take to the streets and to refuse to vote for any member of the GOP.  Recall that the beginning of the current trend towards too little tax revenues and especially too little taxation of the ultra rich was radical reduction of rates with purported base-broadening (such as elimination of the capital gains preference, creation and then ramping up of the alternative minimum tax).  As could be expected, lower rates lived on (and were lowered even more by Bush) but much of the base broadening was short-lived:  lobbying by the privileged at the top led to a quick return to a capital gains preference and the undoing of the AMT as an inequality leveler.  The Bush tax cuts rewarded corporate owners and managers and the wealthy class with extraordinary tax relief, while imposing long-term deficits on the country, behind a cheerful facade of "tax simplification" that was irrelevant for the 70% of the population that uses the standard deduction.

There is a third leg to the reduction-of-inequality stool.  Tax reform that restores a truly progressive income tax is one leg.  Benefit reform that builds on the achievements of the New Deal rather than destroying them is another.  The third leg is what some call "predistribution"--paying attention to the means by which the uppercrust has seized all of the productivity gains and reduced the ability of everyone else to have a decent, sustainable livelihood. 

British Labour leader Ed Miliband has called for predistribution as a new agenda in Britain.  See Predistribution: A Big New Idea, Noted, The Nation (Oct. 8, 2012), at 5. 

The term [predistribution] was coined by US political scientist Jacob Hacker, who in 2011 noted that discussions of government responses to inequality often begin and end with redistribution [downwards]--taxing the rich to provide benefits for the rest.  But that's only half the equation, Hacker said, uring progressives to pay more attention to 'the way in which the market distributes its rewards in the first place.' That includes regulations that protect consumers and empower workers: 'The regulation of markets to limit extremes and give the middle class more voice is hardly easy. ... But it is both more popular and more effective than after-the-fact mopping up.'

Milibrand agrees.  Noting the high human cost of austerity, he said, 'We need to care about predistribution as well as redistribution.' After trying 'to make work pay better by spending more on trasfer payments,' he argued, government must 'also make work pay better by making work itself pay.'

These concepts--predistribution (making up for malfunctioning markets to make work itself pay) and redistribution downwards (actual reallocation from market results through taxation and benefit policies)--are closely interrelated.  Successful redistribution downwards augments the ability of workers to afford necessities and small luxuries, and that economic activity empowers workers in the markets and gives workers an opportunity for a voice in the markets and workplaces compared to a position where employers and owners have almost dictatorial control and can garner all the workers' productivity gains for themselves.  Focus on predistribution, however, reminds us that worker rights are essential to a sustainable, broad-based economy

What kinds of rights are we talking about?  Surely a critical right is the workers' right to collective bargaining (supported by a "yes" vote on Proposal 2 in Michigan that would put that right in the state constitution where it could not be removed by the radical right legislative block).  Surely the right of the state to build infrastructure (that will create worker jobs) rather than allowing a wealthy tycoon to corner the market on international bridge crossings in Detroit and hog the revenues for himself rather than allow them to be earned by the people (Proposal 6, vote "no" so that Matty doesn't have veto power allowing him to co-opt public infrastructure for his private profits).

Predistribution pays attention to how much ordinary workers are paid compared to how much the managers at the top get out of a company.  We should be "pushing local employers to narrow the pay ratio between the top and the bottom ranks of their workforce."  Id.  For too long, we have acted like it is just fine for the "market" to demand that the wealthy be allowed to exploit communities and workers for their own benefit.  We need to say no.

Predistribution pays attention to regulations that protect workers--from worker safety to time off to family leave. It disregards the multinational corporations' pleas for laws to suit them and instead asks why we should be subsidizing their ability to move active business assets to foreign countries and leave US workers unemployed.  It acnkowledges that we have for too long allowed corporate owners and managers to snow us with their claims that "globalization" and "free trade" worked for our benefit, when in fact these are excuses for offshoring jobs so that the owners and managers can enjoy even higher "rent" profits.  As Milbrand says, "It's just not true that all the top CEOs will leave the country unless we pay them whatever they demand."  Id. 

Income and Wealth Disparity Measures--are the richest of the rich hiding their wealth abroad?

In the US today, the maldistribution of resources continues unabated.  The wealthy take in a larger and larger share of the income, while the rest stagnate or sink into poverty. See, e.g.,  Dave Gilson & Carolyn Perot, It's the Inequality, Stupid, Mother Jones (March/April 2011) (a great set of charts illustrating the income and wealth disparity in America).   As studies by Piketty and Saez (mentioned here in earlier posts on income inequality) indicate, the income for the top 1 percent more than doubled between 1980 and 2010.  See Piketty & Saez, Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998, 118 Quarterly Journal of Economics 1-39 (2003) (tables updated to 2010 in excel format, March 2012, and available at Saez website, here).  Average incomes for the very top 0.01 percent grew at an even faster pace--in 2010 they were more than 4 times what they were in 1980, having grown to an average of $23.8 million annually!. The Great Recession "has hit bottom 90% incomes much harder than the 2001 recession" while the top decile "remained virtually constant."   Saez, Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States (Updated with 2009 and 2010 estimates) (Mar. 2, 2012).    

What was going on in this period?  The extreme anti-government, pro-elite right wing and its Friedmania economic ideology were the essential driving forces.  Reaganomics became the dominant creed--the more it actually failed, the more its adherents favored doubling down on the medicine of privatization of essential government functions; deregulation of banks and other important quasi government functions, militarization (including huge increases in military expenditures and fabricated rationales for going to war to create a justification for continuing them; and the related goals of cutting earned benefit programs for the vast majority of ordinary folk accompanied by decreasing tax revenues through tax cuts for the rich, pushing so-called "free trade agreements" that furthered the multinationals' globalization goal and allowed them to take their active businesses abroad without paying any penalty, with the result of offshoring jobs and the elite's resources. CEOs decided they no longer needed to feel bad about getting their buddies on the boards to pay them obscene salaries at 3 or 4 hundred times what an ordinary worker made while workers were left without any of the productivity gains that their labor provided.  Banksters took over the economy, combining reckless speculation with offshoring, tax shelters, and computerized trading that insured they could trade a step ahead to profit off their customers' orders.  All of these ills that led us to the financial crisis and the Great Recession, and the lowered economic expectations of ordinary folk in America can be traced to the so-called "reaganomics revolution" and the hawking by purported think tanks of the free-trade ideology.

Saez points out that the recovery from the Great Recession was uneven in the same way that the decades since Nixon have been.  While the botton 99% saw an increase in their incomes of 0.2% by the end of 2010, the top 1% grew by 11.6%!  Corporate profits and dividends grew strongly in 2011, while wages and salary accruals grew "only modestly" and unemployment stayed very high.  Id.

The top 1% clearly control most of America's assets.  See, e.g., the following chart from Dave Gilson, Who are the 1 Percent?, MOther Jones (October 2011.

According to the Levy Institute, which does considerable work tracking wealth, there has been more of a gain in wealth at the top than among the vast majority of Americans.  See Edward Wolff, Recent Trends in Household Wealth in the United States: Rising Debt and the Middle-Class Squeeze--an Update to 2007, Levy Economics Institute (March 2010). 

From 1989 to 1998, mean wealth continued to surge while median net worth rose at a rather anemic pace. Indeed, the only segment of the population that experienced large gains in wealth from 1983 to 1998 was the richest 20 percent of households.

At the same time, however, it doesn't appear--at least at first glance--that the wealth gap has been consistently tracking the income gap. Wolff notes that the reasons are not clear for why there was not as much an increase in net worth inequality as there was in income inequality between 2004 and 2007.  Id. at  13.    But clearly, between 1983 and 2007, those at the top gained the most.

[T]he largest gains in relative terms were made by the wealthiest households.  Thye top 1 percent saw their average wealth (in 2007 dollars) rise by over 9 million dollars or by 103 percent.  The remaining part of the top 1quintile experienced increases from 81 to 142 percent and the fourth quintile by 71 percent.  While the middle quintile gained 50 percent, the poorest 40 percent lost 63 percent!  By 2007, their average wealth had fallen to $2,200.  Id. at 13.

[T]he top quintile collectively accounted for 89 percent of the total growth in wealth, while the bottom 80 percent accounted for [only] 11 percent.  Id at 14.

A blog (toomuch online) looks at these statistics, and the CRS study on wealth distribution   [see Linda Levine, An Analysis of the Distribution of Wealth Across Households, 1989-2010, Congressional Research Service (July 17, 2012) (based on Federal Reserve data)]   and asks why wealth inequality appears to grow significantly less than income inequality. 

The CRS study shows "no significant expansion in the gap between the wealth of the awesomely affluent and the rest of America."  Mitt's Offshore Shenanigans: The Bigger Story, Toomuchonline.org (July 21, 2012), though the top 10% continue to own almost 75% of the total wealth and "net worth has become more concentrated in recent decades."  CRS study, above, at 4.

The share of wealth held by the top 10% of wealth owners grew from 67.2% in 1989 to 74.5% in 2010. Declines occurred in the remaining 90% of households. The share of total net worth owned by households in the 50th to 90th percentile of the wealth distribution fell from 29.9% in 1989 to 24.3% in 2010, and the share of households in the bottom half fell from 3.0% to 1.1%.  CRS study, at 4.

How could anyone have thought it would be otherwise?  After all, millionaires with ample savings fared better than ordinary folk who lost their jobs and blew through their meager savings.  Clearly, these super-wealthy do not spend all their increased income.  It is extraordinarily hard to spend twenty-three million dollars annually year after year.  

 So what accounts for the fact that we don't see evidence of a huge increase in wealth disparity paralleling the huge increase in income disparity?

Maybe the wealth of the super-wealthy isn't being counted in the CRS study?  Sure enough, says Too Much, one group isn't included at all--the wealth of the Forbes magazine list of the richest 400 in America, which in 2010 was $1.37 trillion (not chicken feed). See  Mitt's Offshore Shenanigans (referencing CNN Money 2010 story referring to Forbes richest 400).  And it appears that much of the wealth of the wealthiest elite may not be counted in those statistics because it is being hidden offshore.  See, e.g., Stewart, 13 trillion [UK Pound] hoard hidden from taxman by global elite, The Guardian (July 21, 2012).

A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore – as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together – according to research commissioned by the campaign group Tax Justice Network.

James Henry, former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has compiled the most detailed estimates yet of the size of the offshore economy in a new report, The Price of Offshore Revisited, released exclusively to the Observer.

He shows that at least £13tn – perhaps up to £20tn – has leaked out of scores of countries into secretive jurisdictions such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands with the help of private banks, which vie to attract the assets of so-called high net-worth individuals. Their wealth is, as Henry puts it, "protected by a highly paid, industrious bevy of professional enablers in the private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries taking advantage of the increasingly borderless, frictionless global economy". According to Henry's research, the top 10 private banks, which include UBS and Credit Suisse in Switzerland, as well as the US investment bank Goldman Sachs, managed more than £4tn in 2010, a sharp rise from £1.5tn five years earlier.

Let's recap.  Income inequality has grown, so that those at the top of the distribution average in one year what most Americans don't see in a lifetime.  Wealth disparity has grown, but official studies like the CRS study don't seem to show it growing quite as fast as income inequality.  However, those studies are based on Federal Reserve data, which are understandably incomplete.  They don't count the richest 400, and they don't count assets that may be hidden in offshore jurisdictions where they have been protected by banking secrecy.

If we understand the way disparity has grown during the last decades of policies that have heavily favored the rich, then we have the basis for a conversation about what kinds of policies make sense--and specifically, what kinds of tax policies make sense.  The philosophy of democratic egalitarianism suggests that those policies should strive to reduce the gap between classes rather than supporting increasing the gap, based on the recognition that large income and wealth gaps among citizens destabilizes democracy and pushes towards oligarchic/plutocratic forms of government.  Estate taxes that recognize death as the appropriate time to tax the ultra wealthy who generally can avoid taxes in life are a start.  Increasingly higher rates on top incomes so that the top rate continues to increase proportionately to the outside incomes of the super-elite would be another.  Cracking down on offshore assets--through elimination of the idea that a company in the Caymans is anything other than a sham--would be another important step.

 

Illinois's Tim Johnson (Rep.) Squirms under Norquist No-Tax-Increase Pledge

Back in 2002, Tim Johnson represented a safely red district in Illinois and the radical right was pressing on his back with its reaganomics-inspired program to cut-taxes-to-shrink-(nonmilitary)-government-and-eliminate-public-infrastructure-and-social-justice-programs; de-regulate-to-free-up-big-business; privatize-wherever-you-can-especially-schools-bridges-and-other-essential-services.  Not to be outdone, Tim Johnson signed the no-tax-increase pledge on the dotted line, with his right-hand aide as witness.

In spite of the decades of extraordinarily well-funded anti-tax/anti-government propaganda spewed by purported think tanks like the "Americans for Prosperity" arm of the Koch Bros, the anti-estate tax "American Family" coalition arm of the Walton heirs, the Big-Business oriented Chamber of Commerce and Club for Growth and similar groups, the American public seems to be finally beginning to learn to read between the lines and recognize self-serving propaganda for what it is.    Even with all the money being spent to misrepresent and distort the truth about taxes, it is worth noting that Rasmussen polls (run by a leaning-right head) are finding Americans more willing to support tax increases than they were a few years ago.  For example, back in December 2011, despite the anti-tax nonsense of the Tea Party and other radical right-wing groups, only 52% thought tax cuts would help the economy--in the low end of the 51% to 63% range answering that question affirmatively since July 2008.  Similarly, a recent poll showed that 47% favor a candidate who wants to raise taxes on the rich over a candidate who wants no tax increases.  Back in September 50% of Americans favored a mix of spending cuts and tax increases (but 64% weren't willing themselves to pay higher taxes, a product of the NIMBY syndrome).  And a March poll found a significant decrease in Americans responding who thought that America is an "over-taxed" nation. 

[N]ew Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 56% of Likely U.S. Voters believe America is overtaxed. But that’s down from 66% two years ago and 64% last year. One-out-of-three (33%) now believe the country is not overtaxed, while another 12% are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

[ASIDE:   The problem with the question about whether Americans are overtaxed--especially in this age of 527 groups spending buckets of money to convince them that they are--is that it depends on who you are asking and what facts they actually know about taxes, the economy, and what the difference is between effective tax rates and statutory rates.  Everybody hears the radical right prattle on about how high our (statutory) tax rates are.  Very few hear much about effective tax rates and fewer still understand the difference.  The wealthy are not over-taxed, though they have spent a good bit of their money to convince typical Americans that they are.  Those who escape federal income taxation because they earn amounts covered by the standard deduction and personal exemptions and earned income tax credits--amounts intended to keep lower income taxpayers from having to pay income tax--nonetheless have to pay signficant state and local property and sales (and often also income) taxes and have to pay significant federal payroll taxes.  Not surprisingly, they may well feel overtaxed when their wages are going down and their tax burden is staying the same and they hear the think tank spew of anti-tax stuff on the airwaves day and night.]

And now Tim Johnson's district has changed.  He represents a more Democratic electorate, that is less likely to swallow the Tea Party tax aversion hook, line and sinker.  So he is backtracking.  Which is good. It's a shame he backtracked bit by bit, at first claiming he'd never signed and then suggesting his aide signed for him before he finally admitted he had signed the pledge but just didn't consider it cast in granite.   See Are you Now and Have You Always Been?, New York Times editorial (March 11, 2012). 

But to give him credit, he finally did take a  stand against the idiocy of the tax pledge.   See Pat Garofalo, GOP Rep. Blasts Norquist's Anti-Tax Pledge as "Disingenuous and Irresponsible", Think Progress.org (Mar. 8, 2012).  He ought to do it more straightfowardly--by admitting that it is a mistake to assume that tax cuts are always good or that tax increases are always bad and by acknowledging that there is plenty of room to tax the rich more without harming anybody's economic recovery.  His statement (quoted on ThinkProgress) weasles by making clear that he is leery of tax increases other than fixing tax loopholes or raising the Social Security tax.....

 One hopes that these few quasi- brave Republicans who are beginning to speak out against the idiocy of a "pledge" to cut off a key tax policy tool of democratic institutions for supporting public infrastructure and public needs will cause Norquist's pledge to go to the same ignominious fate that awaited Joe McCarthy's anti-liberal binge (under the name of anti-communism) when a lone lawyer questioned his decency.  As a constitutent told GOP representative Rick Berg in a North Dakota town hall meeting (quoted on Think Progress), these guys are supposed to work for their constituents, not for Norquist.