Thomas Piketty’s Radical Plan to Redistribute Wealth – The New York Times

By Nicholas Lemann

• April 19, 2022

A BRIEF HISTORY OF EQUALITY
By Thomas Piketty

“Thomas Piketty begins his latest book by genially mentioning the entreaties he gets to write something short — previous books have been around 1,000 pages long — and ends it by expressing the hope that he has given “citizens,” rather than economists, new weapons in the battle against inequality, which is his master subject. This shouldn’t be taken for a sign that “A Brief History of Equality” is consciously simplified. It isn’t centered on a new economic finding, like that in “Capital in the Twentieth Century,” where Piketty reported that the return to capital exceeds the rate of economic growth. But neither is it written in a tone of patient explanation. It’s useful as an opportunity for readers to see Piketty bring his larger argument about the origins of inequality and his program for fighting it into high relief.

Much of the current discussion of inequality focuses on the period since 1980, when the benefits of growth began to go much more narrowly to the rich than they had before. Although Piketty hardly disputes this, he announces here that he has come to tell an optimistic story, of the world’s astounding progress toward equality. He does this by creating a much wider temporal frame, from 1780 to 2020, and by focusing on politics and measures of well-being as well as economics. Life expectancy has gone from 26 to 72 and, with the rise of compulsory state-provided education, the literacy rate from about 10 percent to 85 percent. Slavery and colonialism, once endemic, have been substantially abolished. Perhaps half of the population of the developed world is at least middle class, though before the 20th century there was no middle class to speak of. The right to vote, formerly restricted even in democracies to male property owners, is well on its way to becoming universal.

What caused this progress? Piketty has a straightforward answer: the advent of progressive taxes on income and wealth, and of the comprehensive welfare state. The taxes reduced inequality and paid for the welfare state, which has provided education, health care, old-age pensions and protection against severe deprivation. Our culture’s familiar assertions about how growth, innovation and entrepreneurship are connected with general prosperity stand completely outside Piketty’s account. Instead, he says, property owners have always used their excessive influence over government to create systems of “military and colonial domination” and environmental despoliation that made them even more wealthy than they were already. The idea that growth can solve the world’s economic woes is “totally insane.” Only a substantial weakening of property rights — a process that in the past included the abolition of slavery, but has many more steps to take — can do that.”

State Death Tax Hikes Loom: Where Not To Die In 2021

Ashlea Ebeling

Senior Contributor

Personal Finance

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17 states and the District of Columbia impose estate or inheritance taxes separate from the federal … [+]

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Update: Iowa repeals its inheritance tax.

“As states address budget woes due to the pandemic, one place they may turn to for revenue as they have in past economic crises is death taxes. Already the District of Columbia has toughened its estate tax levy, effective January 1, 2021. In August, Mayor Muriel Bowser signed the “Estate Tax Adjustment Act” reducing the exemption from $5.67 million in 2020 to $4 million for individuals who die on or after January 1, 2021. A resident dying in 2021 with a taxable estate of $10 million would owe nearly $1 million in estate tax to D.C.

Seventeen states and D.C. impose their own estate or inheritance taxes separate from the federal estate tax levy, which hits far fewer people today. For 2021, the federal estate tax exemption is $11.7 million per person. It’s set to drop back to $5 million per person with inflation adjustments in 2026. But President-elect Joseph Biden has called for the federal estate tax to revert back to its 2009 level: $3.5 million per person. That change could come to help pay for fighting the pandemic and the infrastructure build out he’s promised. ”

Source: State Death Tax Hikes Loom: Where Not To Die In 2021

Opinion | Schwarzenegger: Solar Costs Could Rise if California Regulators Get Their Way – The New York Times

By Arnold Schwarzenegger

Mr. Schwarzenegger is a former governor of California.

“California has more rooftops with solar panels than any other state and continues to be a leader in new installations. But a proposal from the state’s public utility commission threatens that progress.

It should be stopped in its tracks.

When I was California’s governor, we set a goal in 2006 of putting solar panels on one million roofs across the state. Skeptics said it couldn’t be done, but with bipartisan support in the State Legislature, California met its goal in 2019.

The state now has 1.3 million solar rooftops generating roughly 10,000 megawatts of electricity — enough to power three million homes. And more are being added every week. Roughly two-thirds of those rooftops are on houses and businesses; the rest are on government buildings.

But this hard-earned and vitally important accomplishment is now under threat. The California Public Utilities Commission is considering a plan that would make it too costly for many Californians to embrace solar power. A decision could come as soon as Jan. 27.”

Historical Highest Marginal Income Tax Rates | Tax Policy Center

Historical highest marginal personal income tax rates, 1913 to 2020.

Source: Historical Highest Marginal Income Tax Rates | Tax Policy Center

Binyamin Appelbaum | Good Riddance, TurboTax. Americans Need a Real ‘Free File’ Program. – The New York Times

By Binyamin Appelbaum

Mr. Appelbaum is a member of the editorial board.

“Intuit, the tax preparation giant, performed a public service last week by announcing its exit from a federal program that let some Americans use a free version of its TurboTax software.

With this move, the company is making clear what has always been true. Intuit and the rest of the tax prep industry want Americans to pay to file their taxes.

By abandoning the pretense of good citizenship, Intuit is clearing the way for the federal government to do what it should have done long ago: create a public website where most Americans can prepare and file income tax returns at no cost.

In countries including Japan, the Netherlands and Britain, most taxpayers don’t file tax returns. The government withholds taxes from wage income and handles the paperwork. People with more complicated finances still need to fill out forms and submit them, but everyone else can simply check the government’s math and move on with their lives.” . . .

Gabriel Zucman and Gus Wezerek | This Is Tax Evasion, Plain and Simple – The New York Times

By Gabriel Zucman and Gus Wezerek

Gabriel Zucman is an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the authors of “The Triumph of Injustice.” Gus Wezerek is a writer and graphics editor for Opinion.

“In the decades after World War II, close to 50 percent of American companies’ earnings went to state and federal taxes. Economically, it was a golden period. Middle-class incomes grew at roughly the same rate as those of the richest Americans.

But as globalization gave companies the ability to choose where they recorded profits, Congress scrambled to keep their business by lowering corporate taxes. In 2018, American companies were taxed at an average effective rate of less than 14 percent, by our calculations.

Corporate tax breaks have helped business owners amass inconceivable amounts of money over the past few decades. Meanwhile, middle-class Americans have footed the bill, as Congress has propped up the budget by raising taxes on wages.”

Opinion | Five Former Treasury Secretaries: Fund the IRS – The New York Times

By Timothy F. Geithner, Jacob J. Lew, Henry M. Paulson Jr., Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers

The authors are former U.S. Treasury secretaries. Mr. Geithner and Mr. Lew served under President Barack Obama, Mr. Paulson under President George W. Bush, and Mr. Rubin and Mr. Summers under President Bill Clinton.

“Six hundred billion dollars per year, and growing: That is two-thirds of total nondefense discretionary spending by the federal government, about what is spent on defense operations, military personnel and procurement, and more than mandatory federal expenditures on Medicaid. It’s also approximately how much unpaid taxes cost the U.S. government. This must change, and it can.

The five of us served as Treasury secretary under three presidents, both Republican and Democrat, representing 17 years of experience at the helm of the department. While we are not in agreement on many areas of tax policy, we believe in the importance of strengthening the tax system to do more to collect legally owed but uncollected taxes — which, left unaddressed, could total $7 trillion over the next decade. We are convinced by the strength of our experiences that more can be done to pursue evasion in the ways outlined by President Biden’s recent proposal to increase the resources and information available to the I.R.S.”

David Lindsay: Bonjour. Viva la tennis a la Internationaux de France de Tennis, aka the French Open. It is more scandalous than the shortages at Starbucks. Naomi Osaka has withdrawn, since she felt depressed and hounded by the new boss Gilles Moretton. He apparently was heavy handed, and deserves a big reprimand. However, he should be allowed to keep his job, since Naomi was wrong not to return his phone calls. Helping the IRS raise more taxes, is a much simpler subject, so here is your lift for the day. Tax cheats must pay! See the article above.

Investors Fret as Biden Takes Aim at a 100-Year-Old Tax Loophole – The New York Times

By Joe Gose

June 8, 2021

“As a real estate investor, Michael Clarke has learned how to roll earnings from the sale of one property into the purchase of another to save on his tax bill.

Last year, Mr. Clarke sold a residential rental property that he had owned for decades in suburban Washington for $700,000 and used the proceeds to buy a $1.2 million Dollar General building in rural Virginia. Recently, he sold another long-owned rental home for $580,000 and rolled those proceeds into the purchase of a rental worth roughly $800,000.

Thanks to a 100-year-old provision in the tax code, Mr. Clarke did not have to pay taxes on the gains from the properties he sold.

Known as Section 1031, which covers a transaction that is commonly referred to as a like-kind exchange, the law provides real estate investors a tax deferral on the financial gain of a sale if they roll the proceeds directly into a similar investment property within 180 days. The rationale for the benefit is that it promotes economic activity and that, by replacing one property with another, investors are forgoing pocketing their underlying sales gains.”

During the war, the top “marginal rate” was 94% -Teachinghistory.org

” . . . .  The “exceedingly high” part of this question most likely refers to the federal income tax’s “confiscatory” top rates coming out of World War II, which the Eisenhower Administration left in place into the 1960s. During the war, the top “marginal rate” was 94%, but 94% of what? Then as now, income tax rates moved up at distinct break points. In this made-up example, consider a 15% rate up to $25,000, 21% from $25,000 to $50,000, and 25% over $50,000. Those making $50,001 or more won’t pay a quarter of their total income, but rather 15% of the first $25,000, 21% of the next $25,000, and 25% of everything above $50K. That’s why the system is called progressive – the percentage rate progresses upward with income, but the higher percentage applies only to new (marginal) income above each break point. In 1944-45, “the most progressive tax years in U.S. history,” the 94% rate applied to any income above $200,000 ($2.4 million in 2009 dollars, given inflation).  . . . ”

Source: Teachinghistory.org

Paul Krugman | Biden, Yellen and the War on Leprechauns – The New York Times

By Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

April 8, 2021

• 760

Credit…Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Thinkstock, via Getty Images

“In the summer of 2016, Ireland’s Central Statistical Office reported something astonishing: The small nation’s gross domestic product had risen 26 percent in the previous year (a number that would later be revised upward). It would have been an amazing achievement if the growth had actually happened.

But it hadn’t, as government officials acknowledged from the beginning. It was, instead, an illusion created by corporate tax games. At the time, I dubbed it “leprechaun economics,” a coinage that has stuck; luckily, the Irish have a sense of humor about themselves.

What really happened? Ireland is a tax haven, with a very low tax rate on corporate profits. This gives multinational corporations an incentive to create Irish subsidiaries, then use creative accounting to ensure that a large share of their reported global profits accrue to those subsidiaries.

In 2015 a few big companies appear to have gotten even more aggressive about their profit-shifting, which led to a surge in the value of production they reported doing in Ireland — a surge that didn’t correspond to anything real.

To understand the big corporate tax reform proposed by the Biden administration, what you need to know is that it’s all about the leprechauns.

One way to think about the huge corporate tax cut Republicans rammed through in 2017 is that its underlying premise was that the leprechauns were real. That is, the tax cut’s architects insisted that corporations had been moving operations abroad to avoid U.S. taxes, and that slashing those taxes would bring millions of jobs back home.

It didn’t happen. In fact, the tax cut had no visible effect on business investment, probably because it was addressing a fake problem. U.S. corporations hadn’t been moving jobs overseas to avoid taxes; they had just been avoiding taxes.

The true impact — or actually lack of impact — of profit taxes on business decisions becomes obvious if you look at where corporations report big overseas earnings.

If they were truly responding to taxes by making large foreign investments that eliminated American jobs, we’d expect to see a lot of their profits coming from major production centers like Germany or China. Instead, more than half of the profits U.S. corporations report from overseas investments come from tiny tax havens, including places like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands where they have no real business at all.

By the way, this isn’t just an American problem. The International Monetary Fund estimates that about 40 percent of the world’s foreign direct investment — basically corporate cross-border investment, as opposed to “portfolio” purchases of stocks and bonds — is “phantom” investment, accounting fictions set up to avoid taxes. That’s why on paper Luxembourg, with just 600,000 people, hosts more foreign investment than the United States does.

So the real problem with U.S. corporate tax policy isn’t loss of jobs, it’s loss of revenue — and the Trump tax cut made that problem worse.

For the most part the Biden administration’s Made in America Tax Plan is an effort to reclaim the revenue lost both as a result of profit-shifting and as a result of the Trump tax cut, in order to help pay for large-scale public investment.”   . . .