Ah, those were the days: the 1950s, when the top marginal tax rate was 91% and the economy was booming. …
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Politics and Economics
…Kate Manne introduces the word “himpathy” to describe “the inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy powerful men often enjoy in cases of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, homicide and other misogynistic behavior.”
Politicians run on platforms, which are statements of goals, problems, and proposed policies that aim to achieve the goals by fixing the problems. I often share the stated goals of both Republican and Democratic politicians. Yes to widespread prosperity! What’s more likely to give me pause is their take on what’s wrong with this country and what to do about it. Consider, for example, how Democratic candidates discussed economic issues in last week’s debates:
The FBI compiles detailed stats on US hate crimes, based on data submitted by thousands of law enforcement agencies covering most of the US population. News outlets and politicians often cite the FBI data as proof that hate crimes are increasing in the age of Trump. So let’s look at the data!
“Look at the business model of an insurance company. It’s to bring in as many dollars as they can in premiums and to pay out as few dollars as possible for your health care. That leaves families with rising premiums, rising co-pays, and fighting with insurance companies to try to get the health care that their doctors say that they and their children need.” Elizabeth Warren, quoted by Jack Cassidy/New Yorker in The First Democratic Debate Shuns Donald Trump in Favor of Substance June 27, 2019
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently released a report analyzing household income in the US from 1979 through 2014. Among other things, the report documents trends in US income inequality.
…Of course, the most affluent households did a lot better than the rest (228% cumulative income growth for the top 1%). But even the lowest income group made significant gains (69% cumulative income growth), mostly because their taxes went down and government transfers became increasingly generous during this period.
Poverty, income volatility, job instability, and lack of social mobility are real problems in the US. While most Americans manage to climb the socioeconomic ladder to achieve a decent version of the American Dream, some get stuck on the lower rungs. They need help.
The ASBI would not be means-tested, so recipients could work part- or full-time. Although the ASBI would replace federal student aid programs, state aid programs would not be affected. Unlike Pell Grants, the ASBI would not drive up school fees because it would turn students into cost-conscious consumers.
This post is not about tax rates. Higher tax rates don’t necessarily translate into additional tax revenue, because tax rates interact with economic behavior in complicated ways. That discussion is for another post. This post is about how to use the gift of extra tax revenue.
Spectrem Group, a wealth management research firm, conducts a semi-annual survey of 750 millionaires for CNBC, aka the “CNBC Millionaire Survey”. The latest survey asked respondents whether they supported Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax proposal.
Not counting Switzerland, the average US household is less tax-burdened than the average household in the other countries….But tax rates give an incomplete picture of a country’s tax system. We also have to look at tax revenue as a portion of the whole economy:
Now for the pricing plan. HUD already has rent-subsidy programs that cover up to a third of rent. The big California cities also provide rent subsidies. For instance, in the opening quote, Major Breed’s rent subsidy plan worked out to $6,000 per year per housing unit. That’s pretty reasonable. But subsidizing residential hotel units would be even cheaper. Check it out…
Consider: San Francisco had 65,000 residential hotel units in 1910, compared to around 19,000 units today. These were teeny rooms (typically 8 x10 feet) with barely enough space for a bed and a dresser (bathroom down the hall) but at least they offered shelter and safety from the streets. Many of the individuals who lived in these units were single men with problems that plague the chronically homeless today: substance abuse, mental illness, disability. Just like today.
The difference is they had a place to stay.
Empathy is also associated with ingroup bias and outgroup antagonism. One is more likely to feel the joys and sorrows of some people more than others, especially if they’re the same ethnicity.
Per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 195,530 chief executives in 2018, with a mean annual salary of $200,140. That doesn’t seem unfairly high, given that the mean annual compensation for physicians in 2018 was $299,000. But the CEO pay that gets people riled up isn’t what run-of-the-mill chief executives get, it’s the CEOs pulling in millions working for the top companies. For instance, the $14 million average annual compensation paid to S&P 500 CEOs…
The basic theme in these stories is that college has become so expensive that students increasingly rely on loans to fund their education and the resulting burden of student debt has kept millennials from realizing the American Dream of home ownership and wealth accumulation…. I decided to investigate the matter further.
I’m going to concentrate on cutting health insurance spending, which consumes 75% of US healthcare expenditures: a whopping 2.6 trillion dollars a year. Some considerations…
RAND Corporation analyzed the cost of hospital care across 25 states and found that hospitals, on average, charged the privately insured 2.4 times what they charge Medicare patients. A separate study by West Health found that private insurers paid California hospitals more than two times as much as Medicare paid for similar services. Private non-profit hospitals charged the most for privately insured patients.
Note that economic freedom and government regulations are perfectly compatible, as long as the regulations are “necessary to protect and maintain liberty itself”. Of course, that wording invites a whole slew of questions, such as…