The laffer curve was used to justify lower taxes in order to maximize government revenues. When you look at an individual, you can imagine that each individual would have an optimal laffer curve. Too high of a tax rate, and people aren't incentivized to work for one more dollar. However, we never talk about the laffer curve for dead people. I'd say that it could be about as high as you want to make it, and they're not going to work any more or less for an additional dollar. And their children who inherit that wealth, also.. higher laffer curve. Somehow Republicans don't bring that up when they advocate lower taxes on the rich.
A handful of super-rich families got together in the 90s, hired some people to put together a campaign to re-label the estate tax as the death tax and convince everyone it was causing families to lose their small farms, and we haven’t talked seriously about it since.
Larger scale family farms that would go over the estate tax minimums make up around 4% of all farms in the US, from what I can find. Disrupting about 4% of farms upon the death of the farmer does in fact seem like a bad idea to me. But thst didn't stop Stalin from liquidating the kulaks.
>However, we never talk about the laffer curve for dead people. I'd say that it could be about as high as you want to make it, and they're not going to work any more or less for an additional dollar.
Can you really not imagine that what happens to their wealth after they die, wealth they were presumably accumulating at least in part for their children, would have zero effect on how much they work before they die? Honestly, your argument here comes across as utterly unserious.
Yeah the graph is more for vibes than an actual analogy. The yellow slice represents the top 1%, purple 90-99%, green 50-90%, and red bottom 50%. It would make a bit more sense if those slices were labeled "1 person", "9 people", "40 people", and "50 people" respectively.
Sure. Hedge fund owners, VC firm owners, cosmetic surgeons, the Walton heirs, and Zuck/Jensen/Jeff/Elon own 97.5% of all wealth in the United States. The former three, while each representing cohorts, are very small cohorts. The latter are billionaire individuals.
If you're an American and not among those specific groups, your share of the remaining 2.5% is split with the rest of the US population in that slice (i.e., the overwhelming majority of the population). It's an illustration of our extreme wealth inequality. (Whether it's an effective or good one is a matter of opinion, but I do think it broadly conveys what it intends to.)
Even then, the numbers don't even remotely work out. Consider this "Elon Bezos" person; the combined net worth of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos is about $1.3 trillion or so, and the "Top 0.1%" category in the Fed's data has a net worth of about $25 trillion. This is not a small difference.
If you liquidate Elon or Bezos' wealth and distribute it to every US citizen, you're looking at a one time payment of $1-2K per US citizen, and that's only if the value of the assents holds as you attempt to liquidate everything. If you sell it off slowly, you'll get more, but a few years of payments of $50/mo from the Bezos estate is hardly a UBI utopia.
I can do far better for myself than that if I'm simply allowed to work overtime, and especially if I'm not criminalized for savings that I invest.
> n, and that's only if the value of the assents holds as you attempt to liquidate everything. If you sell it off slowly, you'll get more, but $50/mo from the Bezos estate is hardly a UBI utopia.
This misses the point entirely; wealth redistributive policies aren't intended to significantly boost the wealth of low wealth citizens directly, they're intended to dissipate the incredible concentration of political power that corrodes our democratic basis of governance. When individuals control more wealth and capital than a significant number of nation-states, barriers to regulatory capture and overwhelming information/narrative control (via media/platform ownership consolidation) effectively dissolve. We're seeing the consequences of that playing out in the US in realtime.
Adopting redistributive policy is the only way in which the US can return to an even remotely representative "democracy." We'll only see progress if we can disarm the campaign finance firehose currently wielded by private interests. Only then, with a subsequent government consisting of politicians more beholden to constituents than financiers, will we be able to return to enacting policies to close tax loopholes, tax more progressively, and improve consumer/labor protections; those would do the majority of the heavy lifting in terms of improving QoL of the lower income classes. This isn't a new idea, it was well understood by trust-buster Teddy Roosevelt.
Another thing that gets lost is that there are a few layers between Jeff and Elon and the rank-and-file. If everyone paid their fair share it'd be a lot less likely that every world-class city has 10% of its real estate locked up in pied-a-terres. The ability to dodge taxes really kicks in at mid 8 figures, not billions.
You realize that Elon and Bezos are stealing from you when you invest and get taxed at 50% marginal, right? They certainly don't pay anywhere near that. The trick they play on you is by lumping you in with them in spirit (hard working go-getters) whereas by actual buying power you're closer to the homeless guy panhandling on the street.
The wealth concentration is a symptom of a dysfunctional economy based around rent-seeking monopolies. If you address that, the wealth equality comes as a result thanks to the non-zero sum nature of the economy, as more people are able to operate businesses in a fair way.
This is almost exactly the situation that resulted during the first gilded age with standard oil. Antitrust legislation works wonders if it has teeth. Currently it does not.
I think there's a case to be made against generational wealth on the basis that it can suppress free enterprise by acting monopolistically, capturing a regulatory environment, and/or by draining liquidity from an economy. But that is clearly not the case being made by most of the people who harp on wealth inequality. Free enterprise would eventually lead to inequality all over again, so obviously that's gotta go too /s
The pie gets bigger as long there is room for economic growth, which points to our finite planet and a zero-sum economy after all. When the non-zero wealth creation is only in the form of eg. circular investment, as we see it today, i would dismiss it as a detached numbers game.
Well, the labels are fundamentally misleading: According to the author's data, "40 people get 0.75 slices each", whereas that 30 slice pie is labeled as "Hedge funders, fascist VCs, and cosmetic surgeons". Even if you take a charitable view to bundle every possible related occupation, I can hardly understand how labeling 40% of the US population as "Hedge funders, fascist VCs, and cosmetic surgeons" is accurate.
For working and middle class households, the US tax burden is usually lower than in most European states, especially once payroll/social-insurance taxes and VAT are included. The US federal tax system is also very progressive by OECD standards, so upper-income households carry a larger share of federal taxes while the lower/middle bear less of the explicit tax load
I'd love the idea of a more equal share of wealth in America. Unfortunately most of the proposed solutions tend to be of the "make everyone equally miserable" sort, and usually come from the sorts of people that imagine themselves as the commissars and cadres of the new regime in such a situation.
Europe has tried to limit to wealth of the wealthiest, and in the process seems to have utterly kneecapped their own economies and development. The poorest US states are wealthier (even when adjusting for PPP) than all but the wealthiest European nations.
The standard of life you get is one you can afford. GDP PPI does a better job of capturing this than GDP, but better yet look at how long people live. The best raw GDP is gotten when you drive your working class until they collapse and die and thus is a shitty metric for measuring quality of life unless that means the ability to acquire globally manufactured trinkets to you.
Americans have homes roughly twice as big as European homes, and a far higher percentage of Americans are homeowners than Europeans. Home ownership rates are within a few percent of each other too.
And which do you think is which? Whatever the "intent" of either the US or EU economies, the US has produced far greater wealth and material prosperity for its citizens than Europe has for its citizens.
Material prosperity. Euros don't have the newest iPhones, 3 row SUVs or a gas dryer that gets your load of laundry crispy in 30 minutes flat. They have third spaces, public transit that actually covers cities/intra-city transport and in southern countries actual food (for now).
Nope, even adjusting for health care costs the average American is still roughly 20-40% richer than the average European. This may come as a shock to you, but roughly 20% of Americans are on Medicaid, our state-sponsored healthcare insurance. America does actually provide healthcare for its poorest citizens.
In fact, America's wealth (and our fairly generous welfare programs, despite what Europeans might think) actually enables the massive obesity rates we have, which is one of the main reasons we have lower life expectancies. If Europeans were richer they'd likely be eating themselves to death more like we do (though cultural and other factors play a role too).
You don't think Europeans can afford to eat the cheap crap that makes one fat? Healthy food is expensive, garbage food is cheap. Obesity is a poverty problem in the whole western world.
No it must be that Europeans can't afford corn fed omega-6 beef, corn syrup water and baked extruded corn mush coated in MSG so they have to get by eating real bread, tomatoes and ham.
I wish we’d focus more on living standards than wealth as I think that’s what really matters. “How can we lift up the people with low living standards in the US?” should be the question rather than “How can we keep people from becoming ultra rich?” which I think is what happened in Europe. The only reason wealth should be checked is because of undue influence on politics/power. Otherwise I don’t care if there are 1,000 trillionaires as long as as many Americans as possible have a good quality of life. I think for many the obsession with redistributing wealth comes from a deep seated jealousy.
Regarding your last sentence about the jealousy, I have been thinking about this quite a bit for myself, if it is actually jealousy. And I have come to the following realisation:
I would like 20$ million. It would let me live the life I want (with extra), and take care of the people I love. I would be able to spend my time doing only things I like. I am envious of people having this kind of wealth. I don't really want more, and I am not more envious of someone having 100 of millions of dollars. This you must just belive me on, but I truly don't see what I would do with more than 20$ million.
But they, the ones with hundreds of millions, are the ones I want to tax. Because I am afraid of them, afraid of the power that comes with the wealth. And if it was envy I would have wanted to tax everyone I envied, also the ones with 10-20$ million. But I am fine with them having their wealth, cause they don't scare me.
So, money is likes votes into the economy, and it decides what the economy produces. When a rich man decides that a house should be built for his two dogs, and that another human should spend their time taking care of those dogs, he can use his money to influence the economy to produce as he wants. The labour does not pop into existence from the void, similar with the materials for the house. It is a redirection of the economy to produce what he wants.
Money is not like mana, it does not conjure things into existence, it moves (through the invisible hand) the economy to produce what the owner desires.
Now, this does absolutely not mean that the economy is zero sum (over time). There are of course something the economy can do which will be productive and produce more goods, and there can be bad decisions. Wealth can absolutely be created by actually value creation, but also by a lot of parasitic processes(and inheritance). And the owner of money gets to controll what the economy does, you don't (barely).
A large concentration of wealth will mean that the economy at large will to a larger degree be used to produce what really rich people wants, instead of producing things the middle class wants.
I wonder how many people think about the options we can offer to our children. Will my future grandchildren have access to gene therapy? Or has generational wealth already closed the door for the upper-middle class? Maybe that’s jealousy or envy.
Mississippians average $43,000 of disposable income. Net federal money to Mississippi is roughly $9,000 per capita. Even if we assume that 100% of that $9,000 is welfare payments to the poorest, that still puts Mississippi roughly equal to Germany in terms of disposable income.
And still Mississipi has a child mortality rate og 9.65 infant deaths per 1,000 live births, compared to Germanys 3.4. Life expectancy is 72.6 vs 81.7 (!!)
Looking at income per person really misses some important factors of a societies real riches.
Mississippi has a very high obesity rate (enabled by our wealth and our fairly generous welfare programs, actually). Mississippi also has a far higher percentage of black residents than the median US state, and blacks generally have higher rates of obesity and lower life expectancy due to lifestyle choices, higher rates of participation in gang violence (which leads to a higher murder rate), and various other cultural and environmental factors.
A Mississippian is free to eat themselves to death (enabled by Americans' wealth) in a way that Europeans simply can't.
I think the wealth should be age adjusted for inflation. Older people have had much more compounding than younger folds, much more time to save and earn, etc. Just doing it by raw percentages is a bit too raw.
Generally, income distribution is a solved problem. The issue is that too many people aren't willing to take the steps necessary to get the income they seek. They'd rather scream about the minimum wage, the ultra-rich, the evil white men, etc. Redistribution schemes do not work. Bottom line, stay in school, get a functional education, stay off drugs, moderate alcohol intake, and don't have kids early, particularly when you aren't married. Yes, I'm aware that there are those people for whom such steps are insurmountable. That's where community organization come into play, e.g., churches, NGOs. It isn't the government's role to ensure equal outcomes. That's called communism. And it fails everywhere it's tried.
I love the reaction that I see when people are told they are responsible for their own outcomes and it takes work. Getting down voted for such comments is hilarious.
On that note why are the ultra-rich so dead-set on avoiding estate taxation? Shouldn't their children be responsible for growing their own billions when their inheritance takes a 50% haircut?
You don't have to wheel out the boogeyman of communism. The distribution of wealth in this country allows a person to have 1 MILLION TIMES the spending power of somebody who drives a bus, puts out fires or stitches up wounds. Crucially, the distribution is only getting worse.
I find the comment on the role of the government not being ensuring equality of outcomes especially laughable, because it is precisely that government that's been subverted to make the distribution more skewed. I guess the ruling class disagrees with you?
Can you really not imagine that what happens to their wealth after they die, wealth they were presumably accumulating at least in part for their children, would have zero effect on how much they work before they die? Honestly, your argument here comes across as utterly unserious.
It seems to imply the top 2 people own 30% of the wealth, which is not what the data states.
If you're an American and not among those specific groups, your share of the remaining 2.5% is split with the rest of the US population in that slice (i.e., the overwhelming majority of the population). It's an illustration of our extreme wealth inequality. (Whether it's an effective or good one is a matter of opinion, but I do think it broadly conveys what it intends to.)
rest of america == bottom 50%
hedge funders, fascist VCs, etc == 50-90%
walton children == 90-99%
elon bezos == 99.9%
I can do far better for myself than that if I'm simply allowed to work overtime, and especially if I'm not criminalized for savings that I invest.
> n, and that's only if the value of the assents holds as you attempt to liquidate everything. If you sell it off slowly, you'll get more, but $50/mo from the Bezos estate is hardly a UBI utopia.
Adopting redistributive policy is the only way in which the US can return to an even remotely representative "democracy." We'll only see progress if we can disarm the campaign finance firehose currently wielded by private interests. Only then, with a subsequent government consisting of politicians more beholden to constituents than financiers, will we be able to return to enacting policies to close tax loopholes, tax more progressively, and improve consumer/labor protections; those would do the majority of the heavy lifting in terms of improving QoL of the lower income classes. This isn't a new idea, it was well understood by trust-buster Teddy Roosevelt.
Suddenly musk, bezos and friends do not decide what people work on - people do.
1. The economy is not a zero-sum game.
2. The new gilded age concentrates wealth in a way that is harmful to free enterprise, detrimental to the economy, and bad for the world.
This is almost exactly the situation that resulted during the first gilded age with standard oil. Antitrust legislation works wonders if it has teeth. Currently it does not.
The pie gets bigger in more equal societies.
That is the real acid test.
The US has a very progressive taxation system: https://taxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/FedData...
For working and middle class households, the US tax burden is usually lower than in most European states, especially once payroll/social-insurance taxes and VAT are included. The US federal tax system is also very progressive by OECD standards, so upper-income households carry a larger share of federal taxes while the lower/middle bear less of the explicit tax load
Of course, wealth is not exactly income, etc
Europe has tried to limit to wealth of the wealthiest, and in the process seems to have utterly kneecapped their own economies and development. The poorest US states are wealthier (even when adjusting for PPP) than all but the wealthiest European nations.
I grew up in the South. You'll have to kill these people to take away their sweet tea and fried chicken. And that's just one dimension.
I would like 20$ million. It would let me live the life I want (with extra), and take care of the people I love. I would be able to spend my time doing only things I like. I am envious of people having this kind of wealth. I don't really want more, and I am not more envious of someone having 100 of millions of dollars. This you must just belive me on, but I truly don't see what I would do with more than 20$ million.
But they, the ones with hundreds of millions, are the ones I want to tax. Because I am afraid of them, afraid of the power that comes with the wealth. And if it was envy I would have wanted to tax everyone I envied, also the ones with 10-20$ million. But I am fine with them having their wealth, cause they don't scare me.
Money is not like mana, it does not conjure things into existence, it moves (through the invisible hand) the economy to produce what the owner desires.
Now, this does absolutely not mean that the economy is zero sum (over time). There are of course something the economy can do which will be productive and produce more goods, and there can be bad decisions. Wealth can absolutely be created by actually value creation, but also by a lot of parasitic processes(and inheritance). And the owner of money gets to controll what the economy does, you don't (barely).
A large concentration of wealth will mean that the economy at large will to a larger degree be used to produce what really rich people wants, instead of producing things the middle class wants.
Looking at income per person really misses some important factors of a societies real riches.
A Mississippian is free to eat themselves to death (enabled by Americans' wealth) in a way that Europeans simply can't.
Just wild how much the media has become a system for self-congratulations for the global elite barbarian class.
I find the comment on the role of the government not being ensuring equality of outcomes especially laughable, because it is precisely that government that's been subverted to make the distribution more skewed. I guess the ruling class disagrees with you?