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I am no fan of him, and the column did not make me laugh — this is an observation of a rhetorical / op-ed trend development only.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/its-time-to-make-rich-people-uncomfortable-again/2019/05/20/8f7856b2-71a6-11e9-9f06-5fc2ee80027a_story.html
The short form is that it is bad enough that rich people have all the money, they are now dressing comfortably and having fun as well, which is, apparently, an unacceptable overstepping. His proposed (comedic) suggestion is to make them dress uncomfortably again. He is, predictably, down on taxation.
It is sort of interesting to learn the limits of attempts to be relatable through dress, grooming, and advertised behavior. My recollection is that the last time we were mad at the Tech Barons, it was because they were intensely nerdy and overly libertarian workaholics.
In related news, Bloomberg had an article about trying to figure out how much money is hiding out there, by creating models to calculate how much money wherever people hide money these days was used to produce the income actually declared to income taxation authorities. The returns imputed to the super wealthy are, apparently, hilariously low, which results in truly obscenely large imputed piles of money.
I do not actually know how wealthy the super wealthy are. I can tell that things up there are getting a little frothy, because of art prices appearing in the news. However, apparently unlike the youthful economists profiled in the Bloomberg piece, I recognize that you really should not model the size of the pile of wealth based on external validating factors like, how much are they spending on art. Art is how the super wealthy burn money, when it is too slow to just torch $20 bills. Wealthy people turn out to be like every other kind of people: some of them walk around looking poor, and trying to convince you they do not have very much. Some walk around spending like drunken demons (<— is there such a thing?), trying to convince you they have a lot more than they have. Some spend all of their money on housing and the kids’ college education, which you would think would have an upper bound on it, but turns out not to. A few blow it all on parties and hiring people to pretend to be their friends.
I did agree with that piece in that it asserted we really do need to end banking secrecy. That would help in any number of ways. For one thing, like index funds, it would reduce the cost of maintaining one’s wealth by showing you that that expensive financial service is just lining someone else’s kids’ college fund at one’s own expense.
However, I do worry if someone models great wealth by assuming tiny returns, and then proposes a wealth tax that is larger than that imputed annual return. I mean, surely even if you are in your early 30s, you can see that you have just suggested belling the cat. Right?
ETA:
For the record, my preferences are for raising the minimum wage and indexing it to median income in zip code and inflation, which a floor and a ratchet (that is, it only goes up, never down). To deal with the obvious consequences, reduce the administrative load of hiring and laying off to the absolute minimum, to keep people from switching to gray market employment, and then change the law on Is This a Contractor or Is This an Employee, to make it harder to dodge minimum wages and other benefits by contracting versus employing. Finally, more transparency on the compensation range on a per company basis, for the Fortune N, where everyone else can argue about N, but 500 would see to be a bare minimum.
I also favor a federal inheritance tax, higher capital gains rates (but will argue if the proposal is to make them equal to ordinary income), higher ordinary income tax rates by adding more at the top end.
I am open to ideas that help pay for education after K-12, especially when it is linked to areas where our economy needs more workers with particular kinds of training, and where it is focused closely on links to employment in general.
It is really easy to focus on the Reagan era tax code changes as Teh Evil, but honestly, a lot of Teh Evil that produced the inequality we are currently experiencing have as much to do with the lever of the stock market and how it percolates through to the Real Economy as anything else. And that shows up in the article, when it acknowledges that post-Great Recession, the wealthy are doing fabulously. Well, yeah. Because their money is in the stock market (and the pseudo-private venture markets etc.). That goes up and down much faster. But if you tax and force sales in that market, it is pretty predictable that you will reduce the swings and overall level more than anything else. The unequal wealth was created by “freeing” the stock market. Lock it down again, and inequality will take a big step down. But we made that change for a lot of reasons, and we really like some of the results so maybe we should think this through more carefully. Just taxing the money will generate resistance. Eliminating the source of the money will do damage. I think we might have to find a more complicated middle path.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/its-time-to-make-rich-people-uncomfortable-again/2019/05/20/8f7856b2-71a6-11e9-9f06-5fc2ee80027a_story.html
The short form is that it is bad enough that rich people have all the money, they are now dressing comfortably and having fun as well, which is, apparently, an unacceptable overstepping. His proposed (comedic) suggestion is to make them dress uncomfortably again. He is, predictably, down on taxation.
It is sort of interesting to learn the limits of attempts to be relatable through dress, grooming, and advertised behavior. My recollection is that the last time we were mad at the Tech Barons, it was because they were intensely nerdy and overly libertarian workaholics.
In related news, Bloomberg had an article about trying to figure out how much money is hiding out there, by creating models to calculate how much money wherever people hide money these days was used to produce the income actually declared to income taxation authorities. The returns imputed to the super wealthy are, apparently, hilariously low, which results in truly obscenely large imputed piles of money.
I do not actually know how wealthy the super wealthy are. I can tell that things up there are getting a little frothy, because of art prices appearing in the news. However, apparently unlike the youthful economists profiled in the Bloomberg piece, I recognize that you really should not model the size of the pile of wealth based on external validating factors like, how much are they spending on art. Art is how the super wealthy burn money, when it is too slow to just torch $20 bills. Wealthy people turn out to be like every other kind of people: some of them walk around looking poor, and trying to convince you they do not have very much. Some walk around spending like drunken demons (<— is there such a thing?), trying to convince you they have a lot more than they have. Some spend all of their money on housing and the kids’ college education, which you would think would have an upper bound on it, but turns out not to. A few blow it all on parties and hiring people to pretend to be their friends.
I did agree with that piece in that it asserted we really do need to end banking secrecy. That would help in any number of ways. For one thing, like index funds, it would reduce the cost of maintaining one’s wealth by showing you that that expensive financial service is just lining someone else’s kids’ college fund at one’s own expense.
However, I do worry if someone models great wealth by assuming tiny returns, and then proposes a wealth tax that is larger than that imputed annual return. I mean, surely even if you are in your early 30s, you can see that you have just suggested belling the cat. Right?
ETA:
For the record, my preferences are for raising the minimum wage and indexing it to median income in zip code and inflation, which a floor and a ratchet (that is, it only goes up, never down). To deal with the obvious consequences, reduce the administrative load of hiring and laying off to the absolute minimum, to keep people from switching to gray market employment, and then change the law on Is This a Contractor or Is This an Employee, to make it harder to dodge minimum wages and other benefits by contracting versus employing. Finally, more transparency on the compensation range on a per company basis, for the Fortune N, where everyone else can argue about N, but 500 would see to be a bare minimum.
I also favor a federal inheritance tax, higher capital gains rates (but will argue if the proposal is to make them equal to ordinary income), higher ordinary income tax rates by adding more at the top end.
I am open to ideas that help pay for education after K-12, especially when it is linked to areas where our economy needs more workers with particular kinds of training, and where it is focused closely on links to employment in general.
It is really easy to focus on the Reagan era tax code changes as Teh Evil, but honestly, a lot of Teh Evil that produced the inequality we are currently experiencing have as much to do with the lever of the stock market and how it percolates through to the Real Economy as anything else. And that shows up in the article, when it acknowledges that post-Great Recession, the wealthy are doing fabulously. Well, yeah. Because their money is in the stock market (and the pseudo-private venture markets etc.). That goes up and down much faster. But if you tax and force sales in that market, it is pretty predictable that you will reduce the swings and overall level more than anything else. The unequal wealth was created by “freeing” the stock market. Lock it down again, and inequality will take a big step down. But we made that change for a lot of reasons, and we really like some of the results so maybe we should think this through more carefully. Just taxing the money will generate resistance. Eliminating the source of the money will do damage. I think we might have to find a more complicated middle path.