But how do the Europeans do it? They’re not squeezing the rich much more than we do - and yet they have generous social benefits and universal healthcare! The answer’s pretty obvious…
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently floated a marginal tax rate of 70 percent on income over $10 million. The idea is to reduce inequality via redistribution via higher tax revenue….This chart actually explains why there is such income volatility among richest US households: much of their income comes from selling capital assets, such as a business or shares in a mutual fund. These are often one-off affairs and not a steady source of revenue. Thus it’s no surprise that roughly half the households that manage to earn at least a million only do so for a year. In other words, there’s a lot of churn at the top.
Elizabeth Warren recently unveiled a plan to impose a 2% tax on households with net assets worth more than $50 million and a 3% tax on households with assets worth more than $1 billion…Numerous commentators have noted that wealth taxes have fallen out of favor over the last few decades. Austria, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Luxembourg, and Sweden have all abolished their wealth tax since 1990. The main reason is that the tax was hard to administer and failed to generate much money. As a recent OECD report put it…
Industry: “Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.” Ben Franklin Self-Reliance: “Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.” Thomas Jefferson
This headline tells part of the story: Harvard Study Finds Shift to Grass-Fed Beef Would Require 30% More Cattle and Increase Beef’s Methane Emissions 43%. Or if you prefer: The Search for Sustainable Beef: Grazing threatens wildlife and takes an enormous toll on habitats, and won’t fix the climate crisis animal agriculture creates. Yeah, I know. The grass-fed cow movement….
Habitat loss is the biggest threat to biodiversity and endangered species on the planet. Clearing land for agriculture is the principal cause of habitat destruction. Most agricultural land is used for livestock, mainly sheep and cattle.
…in Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Robert Sapolsky concludes a discussion of MFT with the claim that “…conservatives heavily value loyalty, authority, and sanctity.”
In 1994, young adults were more conservative and less liberal than old people. In 2014, it was just the opposite. What happened?
So what is the relationship between inequality, social mobility, and household income?
When people think about how they are “doing”, what is their reference point? Partly their earlier selves, partly people in their social network, and partly people they simply come in contact with at work and in the neighborhood. If they’re going to compare themselves with their parents, they adjust for age: how the parents were doing at their current age. Given that income and wealth peak later in life, the comparison isn’t really compelling until later in life.
“…a four-year old’s openness to a new toy predicts how open she’ll be as an adult to, say, the US forging new relations with Iran and Cuba.” — Robert Sapolsky (2017) Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
What I see here is that the two conservative groups have done rather well, despite their limited education. It makes sense to me that they believe most people can get ahead if they work hard - because, for the most part, that’s how it worked out for them. Is that “system justification”, or simply believing in the system upon the evidence of their own lives?
Locus of control is not just a belief in the head - it is a belief tendency that reflects reality and creates reality. Change the reality and the belief will shift - maybe not in lock-step but in time.
Self-serving bias: the tendency to take credit for desirable outcomes and blame factors outside one’s control for undesired outcome, e.g., attributing a job promotion to hard work but failure to get promoted to a bad boss. What accounts for this tendency? Here are four possibilities:
All that nose-touching, rubbing, and grooming comes with exchange of scents, suggesting that cats within a given colony develop a ‘colony odor’ that is maintained during these behaviors.
What constitutes “state-of-the-art” technology changes from year to year. If the new technology isn’t cheap, households, businesses, utilities, and governments investing in the new technology will not invest again as they wait for the initial investment to pay off. This is called a “lock-in” effect, “where choices made at critical junctures lock in future choices and development” (Johnson, 2001)
Unfortunately, cheaper drugs and administration would not come even close to paying for Sanders’ Medicare-for-all plan. That’s because the high cost of US healthcare is driven by over-testing, over-treatment, overpriced procedures, and overpaid doctors. Check it out:
Why is it is so much easier to commit fraud against Medicare than against private insurance companies? Partly because the Medicare billing system is easy to game (see, for instance, “upcoding” and “inflated risk scores”) and partly because Medicare doesn’t require preauthorization as a condition of payment…
But what about those high administrative costs? According to The Commonwealth Fund, the share of hospital costs devoted to administration is 25% in the US, compared to 20% in The Netherlands, 16% in England, and just 12% in Canada. That sounds pretty damning, but it’s important to remember that administrative costs are often unrelated to insurance matters or are dual-purpose.
We want the pharma wolf to be healthy - not fat and not lean. Robust enough to survive inevitable dips in revenue. So how much could the US cut drug prices without undermining ongoing innovation in the industry?