Wednesday, December 11, 2019
PREVIEW OF COMING ATTRACTIONS
I am currently reading a new book by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, partners in the firm of Piketty, Saez, and Zucman. It is called THE TRIUMPH OF INJUSTICE: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay. I will be finished with it tomorrow [it is not quite 200 pages long], and will report on it then. By way of preview, it is, in effect, a detailed economic defense of the Sanders and Warren plans to tax the wealth of the rich. I think without too much trouble I can place it interestingly in a larger historical and theoretical context. I have always read slowly, a deficiency that did not hinder me when I was doing philosophy, but I could never have hacked it in the world of Lit Crit. Stay tuned.
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The most recent CRS report I can find on proposals for taxing high-income taxpayers is this from 2010: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc29628/m1/1/high_res_d/R41480_2010Nov05.pdf
It doesn't include a "wealth tax," but I bet some of the arguments that Zucman & Saez address echo the ones described here.
About reading faster, probably everyone knows Woody Allan's joke. If not:
I just took a speed-reading course! (Said with enthusiasm)
I finished all of War and Peace in an hour!!! (Said with even more enthusiasm).
It's about Russia.
Not as good as Woody's, but here's Steven Wright: "I just got out of the hospital. I was in a speed reading accident. I hit a book mark and flew across the room."
And apropos of learning to play a musical instrument, again Wright: "When I was in school the teachers told me practice makes perfect; then they told me nobody’s perfect so I stopped practicing."
On the topic of thinking about taxing the rich, I'd recommend my friend Dan Halliday's recent book, _Inheritance of Wealth_. It's short, nicely argued, and, though it goes into some modest degree of detail about tax scheme design, it's not overly technical nor dry. You can see it here: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/inheritance-of-wealth-9780198803355?cc=au&lang=en&
I found most of it to be highly plausible.
Probably less practical (i.e., less likely) than taxing wealth: Bellamy's suggestion (IIRC*) that people are free to pursue wealth but the wealthy are deprived of the right to participate politically, i.e., vote or run for office.
*It's been nearly a half century since I last read the book.
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