We hold in our hands, the most precious gift of all: Freedom. The freedom to express our art. Our love. The freedom to be who we want to be. We are not going to give that freedom away and no one shall take it from us!
Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider
IF YOU FOLLOWED the link at the end of my previous post—to look at the Times site, and the way I eliminated the deficit—the first thing you may have noticed was the percentage figures at the top:
73% Savings from tax increases
27% Savings from spending cuts
This is important, because it's a fundamental key to our problems.
We have been seriously misled, over the last thirty years or so, about the nature of freedom, the nature of democratic government, and the way economics work.
Let's take those one at a time:
The nature of freedom.
We have been taught that freedom is the same thing as big-C Capitalism, that it is basically a matter of majority rule (or minority rule in the case of the Senate), that it is a matter of the people against the government.
We will lower the tax burden on middle-class Americans by asking the very wealthy to pay their fair share.
Bill Clinton and Al Gore
SOME TIME AGO, A reader suggested I look at a clever little puzzle on the New York Times site.
It allows you to make your own decisions about getting rid of the federal deficit, and see how they come out.
I went there, and I eliminated the deficit.
You're welcome.
The real point of the exercise, to me, was that it became clearer and clearer as I went through the choices why we are in the mess we're in.
But before I go into that, here's how I did it:
The story is frequently told of the great English capitalist, Mr. Peel, who took £50,000 and three hundred laborers with him to the Swan River colony in Australia. His plan was that his laborers would work for him, as in the old country. Arrived in Australia, however, where land was plentiful—too plentiful—the laborers preferred to work for themselves as small proprietors, rather than under the capitalist for wages. Australia was not England, and the capitalist was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water.
Eric Williams
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capital (kap' · a · tal) n. |
Capital (Kap' · a · tal) n. |
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A factor of production—any tools or goods which are used to increase productivity. |
Money—especially very large sums of money controlled by very few people. |
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Examples: A stone-age arrowhead, a hammer, a clothes dryer, a workbench, a computer, a guitar, a factory, a road, a car, a tractor. |
Examples: Investments, Stocks, Bank Accounts, Real Estate, Bonds, Partnerships, anything that makes someone very wealthy. |
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The capital you use to make your work easier and more productive may belong to you (your vacuum cleaner), it may belong to a group of people of which you are a part (roads, parks, schools), or it may belong to someone else who lets you use it (your desk at work, the telephone network). |
The Capital owned or controlled by the super-wealthy is sometimes used (usually by others) to increase productivity, but much of the time it is used to acquire more Capital, or to increase the power of, influence the government in favor of, and to make others work for, those who own or control it. |
Knowing what the Creator of the Universe believes about right and wrong inspires religious conservatives to enforce this vision in the public sphere at almost any cost; not knowing what is right—or that anything can ever be truly right—often leads secular liberals to surrender their intellectual standards and political freedoms with both hands.
Sam Harris
THREE POSTS AGO (in this series) I asked four questions:
The parable in the previous two posts is an answer of sorts to the first question.
Ignorance of the past has bred contempt for the lessons which the past might teach. Men prefer to repeat the old experiment without knowing that they repeat it.
George Santayana
THIS POST IS MOSTLY about the correlation of corporate tax rates with growth in household incomes, but I'll begin with a revision of the chart on top income tax rates.
This is meant to address all the constructive criticism which has come my way in the last two days—as some people found the previous chart confusing.
So here's a new version, with less information on the whole, and one minor edit:
The data is the same as the previous chart, except that I removed a single bar which showed income growth with taxes at 38.5%, because that rate only existed for a single year, and I thought it was misleading to include it, as the effect of a tax rate probably takes time to kick in. (The previous years had been at 50%.)
Fair disclosure: I did not remove the 74.7% data, even though that is an average of only two years, because rates had been similar for the previous decade even though I only had the household income figures for 1968-1970.
I think it's easier to notice, on the new chart, that the difference in tax rate between the two proposals on the table is relatively small, while the difference for the middle class may be between gaining or losing ground.
But on to corporate tax rates:
