Yves here. This post is a tad on the shrill side, but as you’ll see from the information marshaled, the vitriol is well warranted.
By Lynn Parramore, s contributing editor at AlterNet and senior editor at INET. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of “Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture.” She serves on the editorial board of Lapham’s Quarterly. Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore. Originally published at Alternet
America’s parasitical oligarchs are masters of public relations. One of their favorite tactics is to masquerade as defenders of the common folk while neatly arranging things behind the scenes so that they can continue to plunder unimpeded. Perhaps nowhere is this sleight of hand displayed so artfully as it is at a particular high-profile charity with the nerve to bill itself as itself as “New York’s largest poverty-fighting organization.”
British novelist Anthony Trollope once wrote, “I have sometimes thought that there is no being so venomous, so bloodthirsty as a professed philanthropist.”
Meet the benevolent patrons of the Robin Hood Foundation.
Robin Hood in Reverse
The Robin Hood Foundation, named for that green-jerkined hero of redistribution who stole from the rich to give to the poor, is run, ironically, by some of the most rapacious capitalists the country has ever produced — men who make robber barons of previous generations look like small-time crooks. Founded by hedge fund mogul Paul Tudor Jones, the foundation boasts 19 billionaires on its leadership boards and committees, the likes of which include this sample of American plutocracy:
-Hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen, who, when he is not being probed for insider trading (his company, SAC Capital Advisors, pled guilty to securities and wire fraud) is busy throwing parties for himself worthy of a Roman emperor at his Hamptons palace and bragging about his $700 million art collection. He suspends a 13-foot shark in formaldehyde from the ceiling his office, perhaps as an avatar of his business practices.
-Billionaire Home Depot founder Ken Langone, who threatened to turn off the charity donations if Pope Francis dared to continue criticizing capitalism and inequality, and also likened the plight of the wealthy in America to Nazi Germany. The GOP megadonor doesn’t care for bank regulation and it’s no surprise that he is the main booster for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s presidential bid, as his plan to shred Social Security is a fond wish of the tycoon’s.
– Hedge fund billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller, funder of right-wing causes who dedicates himself to spreading deficit hysteria and ginning up generational warfare on college campuses by trying to convince young people that they are being robbed by seniors using Social Security and Medicare. A long-time anti-tax crusader and supporter of such anti-labor enthusiasts as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Druckenmiller warned President Obama that any attempt to tax the rich to pay for social services for the poor would be futile.
By occupation (the more useless and parasitical the better), it comes as no surprise that 12 of the 19 men in leadership positions at the Robin Hood Foundation happen to be hedge fund managers. A group called Hedge Clippers, supported by a coalition of labor unions and community groups and devoted to exposing how billionaires scheme to inflate their wealth and influence, has pointed out in a scathing report that the Robin Hood Foundation has close ties to an organization called the Managed Funds Association (MFA) that — shocker! —lobbies tirelessly for unjustified tax breaks for hedgies. Paul Tudor Jones’s top deputy, John Torell, chairs the MFA, and 31 members of Robin Hood’s governing board and leadership committees are executives at firms that belong to the highest membership levels of the organization.
The MFA was relatively small until 2007, when Congress started eyeing the “carried interest” tax loophole. Then it brought out the heavy artillery to protect elites from paying their fair share. The carried interest loophole is the MFA’s top priority.
The King of Scams
The carried interest loophole, as economist Dean Baker put it, is likely the worst of all the “sneaky and squirrelly ways that the rich use to escape their tax liability.” It goes down like this: Hedge fund managers brazenly claim they deserve to pay a special low tax rate on the money they earn overseeing the funds they manage because, um, it’s not guaranteed. So they pay 20 percent instead of the 39.6 percent they would pay if the money were taxed as ordinary income. They get very rich from this windfall, just ask Mitt Romney. But you know what? Lots of workers have no guarantee about the money they’ll earn, from people selling cars to the guy who just served you a burger. Do they get a special tax rate? No, they don’t. They pay full freight. In fact, almost nobody’s income is guaranteed. You could get a pay cut tomorrow. Or a pink slip. Do you still pay regular income tax? Yep, you do.
This unfair tax break basically allows hedge fund managers to screw their fellow Americans out of money that could do things the illustrious patrons of the Robin Hood Foundation claim are so dear to their hearts, like building schools and feeding the poor. According to a Congressional Research Service cited in the Hedge Clippers report, closing the carried interest loophole would generate $17 billion a year. How many hungry children in New York City could that feed? All of them.
The loophole makes absolutely no economic or social sense, it’s just a way for the rich to say, hey, we’re powerful enough to lobby for this insanity, so you little people just go ahead and pay for that airport where our private jets are about to land and that road where our Porsches and limos cruise. It’s a middle finger held up to every hard-working person in America. Dirt kicked in the face of the poor.
It’s a driver of inequality and encourages risky speculation on Wall Street. Hillary Clinton, perhaps hoping to ward off the threat of Bernie Sanders, has been making noise about closing the carried interest loophole, which many a politician has made before. Given the cultural focus on inequality and the egregiousness of the policy, it may just be vulnerable. Let’s hope so.
Den of Thieves
The mission statement of the Robin Hood Foundation brays about all the funding it provides for school programs, generating “meaningful results for families in New York’s poorest neighborhoods.” Soup kitchens! Homeless shelters! Job training! The tuxedoed tycoons throw money at all these causes “to give New York’s neediest citizens the tools they need to build better lives.”
How far does this largesse actually go toward ameliorating New York’s poverty problem? Unsurprisingly, not very far at all. In fact, as Hedge Clippers points out, the poverty rate in the city has grown over the course of the Robin Hood Foundation’s history, from 20 percent in 1990 to 21.2 percent in 2012.
Guess what’s also grown? The bank accounts of 19 billionaires on the Robin Hood Foundation’s boards, which have ballooned 93 percent since 2008.
Hedge Clippers applied a delicious tactic to expose the hypocrisy at the heart of the Robin Hood Foundation with stark mathematical precision— they used the organizations own metrics as an analytical tool. The foundation is famed for using grantee evaluations, cost-benefit analyses, and performance measures, including a metrics system freakishly named “relentless monetization.” So the Clippers applied these methods to the foundation’s hedge fund backers themselves, systematically exposing the degree to which they increase inequality and poverty.
How bad it is? A chilling ratio summarizes just how bad— 44:1. That is to say, for every dollar the Robin Hood Foundation hedge fund managers studied give to the organization’s antipoverty efforts, they soak up $44 from the public in the form of tax avoidance and anti-tax advocacy. The authors of the report believe that to be a conservative estimate.
Take the case of Steve Cohen, he of the shark in formaldehyde, and board member emeritus of the Robin Hood Foundation.
The tally of his recent donations to the foundation: $4,850,000.
The estimated amount he ripped off the public in 2014 by paying special low tax rates: $1,300,000,000.
Quite a difference.
When they aren’t advocating tax swindles, members of the Robin Hood Foundation put in plenty of time fighting fair wages, trying to shred the social safety net, and killing worker protections through their associations with organizations like the Manhattan Institute, the Partnership for New York City (the voice of big business in NYC and a big foe of paid sick leave), and Fix the Debt (a notorious group devoted to crushing Social Security and Medicare).
When you think about it, it looks as if the Robin Hood Foundation members are actively trying to strip the public and strangle working people to such a degree that poverty and nickels thrown by billionaires will be all that’s left of America. The rest of us will all be living in Sherwood Forest.
The Robin Hood Foundation’s new motto: Increasing poverty is our business.
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I’m sorry Yves but this post isn’t shrill enough. If we’re ever going to re-establish progressive taxation and rebuild and expand the social safety we’re going to have to get a whole lot shriller than this post.
The facts are plenty damning. Hammering away at them gives people ammo they can use with third parties. By contrast, if people get carried away with the appeal to emotion, it seems way too often that they lose track of the argument and aren’t very persuasive with the people that they need to convince, those who have a sense that the banks aren’t up to much good, but don’t know exactly what individuals or what practices to focus their energies on.
I absolutely agree. I was quite uncomfortable with the end of the article. They (or their ilk) are not in the business of increasing poverty, they are in the business of getting as rich as possible themselves. This “possible” is every citizen’s business. It is useless to frame it as moral issue, it is a governance issue.
In theory you’re right. It is a matter of governance. But the people who most need to be mobilized (who are also the most likely victims of these financial beasts of prey) often don’t put morality and governance in separate compartments. For them, governance is morality and vice versa. That’s why they’re so frequently taken in by the Right’s use of social issues. So, if it takes a “shrill” moralizing appeal to emotions to get people off of dead center about financial and fiscal reform, then political pragmatism trumps (if you’ll pardon the expression) mere rationality. As that notorious populist Mary Ellen Lease once put it, it’s a matter of raising less corn and more hell.
Or it can be both moral and governance issue. I find it rather dubious to try to remove morality from issues by framing them as something else. It stinks of Randian Objectivism to me.
I think you have offered a really insightful comment.
There is one perspective that suggests the concept of being wealthy is largely distinct from the concept of being impoverished. We can basically ignore the wealthy so long as we address poverty. It’s a dry, amoral, wonkish governance issue. Much of the well-intentioned parts of MMT fall in this camp.
There is another perspective that views inequality as relative – that by definition ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ are inseparable. So long as a minimum aggregate wealth is achieved in a society, what we might loosely call “enough” (which we far exceed in the industrialized world), it is the distribution that matters.
I am strongly in the latter camp. The business of getting as rich as possible is not generally what is going on. What generally is going on is looting – the taking of wealth from others for one’s own use and control. It is about power; money is one aspect of that, a tool to that end, but not the end in and of itself.
Theft of existing wealth is a very different matter from the creation of new wealth. It is absolutely a moral issue. I would counter that the desire to erase the value judgment is part of the obfuscation.
The way comments link to each other in this site is very confusing. But presuming that washunate was answering to my comment, I will try to make my position clearer:
1) I do have a moral judgement on inequality and all attitudes that increase it. But I find the moral argument “useless” in the sense of inefficient.
2) A system that allows “looting” is a very inefficient way to organize a society, and that is why I prefer to frame the question as a matter of governance.
3) I don’t believe that people go around purposefully creating poverty (am I being naive?). But they do go around trying to get as rich (as powerful, as healthy, whatever) as possible. It is our common business to make sure that we create social systems where those private goals interact in such a way that the greatest number of people are satisfied (see point 2).±
Maybe I am being very basic but I see two questions here that I would prefer to see treated separately to give each of them the visibility they deserve: a totally absurd tax loophole that should not exist (and lawmakers should be taken to task); a PR operation that should be exposed for what it is – this is what matters to me:
“fighting fair wages, trying to shred the social safety net, and killing worker protections through their associations with organizations like the Manhattan Institute, the Partnership for New York City (the voice of big business in NYC and a big foe of paid sick leave), and Fix the Debt (a notorious group devoted to crushing Social Security and Medicare)”
How can this happen by excluding morals out of governance? Especially since our so-called governance caters to these individuals by virtue of the fact that they provide the vast sums of money the politicians need for their election campaigns? Heck, I guarantee you that our governance and these individuals are guided by Randian morality, where pursuing the individual self-interest is considered the highest virtue. By that definition, our billionaires and their political servants are indeed the most virtuous and moral people of us all. So what is so wrong about countering their moral beliefs with the moral beliefs held by the majority?
Inefficiency, you would say. But is it really inefficient to ask ” Do you think that people should be left to die if they can’t afford access to health care?” The vast majority on the left and on the right would answer “No” because it is a moral position and most of us would like to think that we are very moral. But then there is that PR thing, financed by the Randian moralists, that has managed to misinform (purposefully of course, let’s not be naive here) the public to such extent that we see the spectacle of people shouting “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” So are you gonna counter emotional manipulation purely with facts and rational discussion? Good luck with that, it will win you a tiny fraction of those victims of billionaire PR. Because they have been manipulated on a deeply emotional level about so many things that matter to their well-being. You need to appeal to their emotions and self-belief in regards to their personal morality to win them back.
The most insidious part of separating governance and morality (while of course manipulating the public emotionally) is that it opens the door to those oh-so-esteemed technocrats who are tasked with ramming through the elites agenda, guided by their policy “expertise” in how to benefit the “greatest number of people” rather than morals and emotions. Or US liberuls preoccupation with process rather than results. I don’t need to explain how that’s worked out for the rest of us.
Like it or not, morality and governance are closely intertwined. The sooner we accept that the sooner we can begin to counter the elites.
Nobody will ever convince me that you can counter emotional manipulation with anything other than facts and rational discussion. And a lot of money, of course.
As to the reasons why we, as human societies, generally chose to do some things and not others… Well, that would be a very long discussion but I tend to use “morality” very sparingly. I guess I am too much of a biologist…
Yes, facts have been working just great to counter emotion-based fearmongering, and perverted christian teachings such as the Gospel of Wealth have convinced most that being poor is a personal moral failing rather than the results of elite thievery. You think the Tea Partiers will listen your facts?! Most Americans ain’t biologists, unfortunately.
You forgot the “lot of money” bit :-)
Which your institution of higher mislearning must have been short on, as they seem to have glossed over the subject of scientific ethics before they handed you your diploma in biology. In case it’s a bit fuzzy, ethics is just a fancy, scientist-approved synonym for ‘morals’. Just something used in order to give scientists some separation from the banality of mere morals.
…the easy way to make a clearly directed comment is to use the “@ commenter” convention. Or to use block quotes, to be perfectly clear about the ideas being debated.
I think that is naive. 1) There are literally thousands of lines of business that create poverty and extract wealth. Whether it is for excessive cost for goods or services. 2) Paying poverty wages creates poverty. 3) Siphoning resources from public institutions creates poverty, because it reduces those institutions ability to perform those vital services.
The prison-industrial complex creates poverty. The medical industry creates poverty (high prices, wealth extraction from seniors). Predatory lending, high interest rates on credit cards, and unscrupulous banking fees create poverty. Blowing up a housing bubble and then speculating on the property when it declines in value creates poverty. The for-profit education system creates poverty. Big funds like Berkshire are even getting into buying and operating trailer parks. This is not going to abate, it is going to worsen.
The best thing you can really do is look at the businesses that pop up in poor areas or ones that are in decline: cash for gold, payday services, tax advances, liquor stores, lottery machines, etc. Look where 1/3 of black youth are going to most likely spend time in their lives (prisons) or where many young uneducated people are going to be employed, in low skill medical services or other service-related jobs. Which are the fastest growing job types.
The sheer fact that elderly care facilities take government money via medicare or medicaid, pay their employees poverty wages with that government money, and then are subsidized by the benefits that their poor employees receive to survive (food stamps, EITC, CHIP, etc) shows how perverse it has become.
I agree not such a shrill post. I believe they get richer by purposefully increasing poverty. Cheap labor is a goal. As an aside i think there are some experienced employees of the big box environment frequenting nc , maybe they could comment about the working conditions but I suspect infantilism is common in ken langones treatment of workers as is the more extreme case of amazon where you’re tracked in every motion. I also believe that these individuals dislike bank regulation because that is the mechanism by which they socialize their losses but not their gains. These guys are socialists. If you’re ever unlucky enough to be in their company you should tell them that just to put a burr under their saddles, don’t expect much of a response though, they’re not nearly as smart and witty as their yes persons would have them believe. Indeed I wonder how mr langone could sleep if he were aware of what a red tinted socialist he really is… That bit of hyperbole aside, I take yves assertions that a smallish and correctly argued point has more leverage than a large, unwieldy and emotionally driven argument and I try more recently to apply that in conversations as I’m looking for more effective ways to deal with the variety of viewpoints.
Yes if anything I think she understates the problem. In addition to the money they manage to swindle via tax dodges, their lobbying requires people to expend time and effort on projects better spent elsewhere.
Their relentless effort to kill social security would be just one example. This is wildly popular program that has been extremely effective since inception at addressing senior poverty, without adding a penny to the deficit. But it has to be constantly defended against the most pitiful lies.
My recent ponder on the social security issue is that with pensions becoming less common there needs to be another untended pile of dough for these socialists to feather their nests with so thus the “need” to privatize social security. Also see that health care thingy we are forced to pay to keep the value of their investments up to model. I found the p.e. and central bank swap posts from the weekend informative to the arcane nature of the biz.
That’s just it, though. It’s not “wildly popular” at all. It’s more quietly taken for granted, so much so that most have no idea the degree to which it keeps them from penury in their seniorhood. So when it comes under attack these same folk agree, “Yeah, privatize it! Get the &^%$ government’s hands off of my SS. This is a free country!” For an entire generation the wealthy have counted on the average American not beginning to pay attention. So far it’s worked out magnificently for them.
And that’s one of the real intellectual challenges/disagreements, I think, amongst the non-far-right.
There have been a number of authors over the years at NC and elsewhere de-emphasizing the role of taxation and the safety net relative to some sort of a JG/ELR system.
The GOP megadonor doesn’t care for bank regulation Yves Smith
Then logically he should be against all government privileges for the banks, including implicit ones such as the lack of a Postal Savings Service in lieu of government deposit insurance.
Some bank critics give away too much by assuming the privileges of the banks, such as a lender of last resort and government deposit insurance, are necessary concessions. They aren’t. Instead, why not counter threats to regulation by proposing credible options to the privileges the banks now enjoy?
The banks hold a knife to the national economy. Why not hold a knife to their privileges as a negotiating strategy?
Who’s to hold the knife? We don’t seem to be organized sufficiently.
Yves has covered this quite well, ideological agency drives the agenda… banks are just the most convenient whipping post. “Free Market” ideologues enabled financial corruption across the entirety of the sociopolitical – economic spectrum due to political leverage.
Skippy…. as equity’s are a form of money they suffer the same dilemma that banks do, e.g. the problem is not confined to traditional banks, that puts the “options” in the same bucket.
When they aren’t advocating tax swindles, members of the Robin Hood Foundation put in plenty of time fighting fair wages, trying to shred the social safety net, and killing worker protections through their associations with organizations like … and Fix the Debt (a notorious group devoted to crushing Social Security and Medicare).
Technically, even non-interest paying fiat is Federal debt* so Fix the Debt is a misnomer.
The real problem then is paying interest on the national debt and that is easily fixed ala Joe Firestone by paying it (the National Debt) off as it comes due with new, interest-free fiat and financing all future deficits the same way.
*The Federal Government must accept its fiat back for taxes so an asset of taxpayers (their holdings of fiat) is a liability (debt) of the Federal Government.
>> *The Federal Government must accept its fiat back for taxes so an
>> asset of taxpayers (their holdings of fiat) is a liability (debt) of the
>> Federal Government.
Let me see if I have this straight. I lend you money for your mortgage and that is my debt? Is that why they called it the “Troubled Liability Relief Program”? I owe you the right to give me back my money so you can pay off my debt and relieve me of the burden to have to accept money. I never could figure out why they used TARP as the acronym instead of TLRP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program
You are not the Federal government. Neither is your bank.
You need to focus on the fact that the Federal government has no need to tax to fund spending. It can pay any bill it wants to by creating more currency. Taxes serve to force the use of its currency and to make sure it does not create too much inflation (as in drain currency that it has spent into existence).
I think we pretty much all disagree with the specifics of Fix the Debt since they basically want to gut the safety net and increase regressive taxation, but how is the name a misnomer?
They directly call for limiting cost growth and raising revenue. Their basic principle is to eliminate federal debt, not fund it with non-interest paying fiat.
When you think about it, it looks as if the Robin Hood Foundation members are actively trying to strip the public and strangle working people to such a degree that poverty and nickels thrown by billionaires will be all that’s left of America. The rest of us will all be living in Sherwood Forest.
Yves Smith
Nails it! Except will there even be public lands to pitch a tent on?
Their Achilles’ Heel though is that charity is no substitute for justice (at least not in any major belief system I know of) and the case can be made that their billions were not earned justly in almost, if not all, cases. Thus restitution, not merely alms, is necessary.
Steve Cohen is almost a parody of a hedgie: an obvious criminal and a sociopath who, even when found out, managed to keep the bulk of his billions and his acceptance by ‘society’. Hedgie hoarders can talk and “philanthropize” all they want. Reinhold Niebuhr said the thing correctly:
Charity is good, but justice is better.
An interesting comparison of the $17 billion annual cost of the carried interest deduction is this figure: $6.3 billion. That is the budget for the entire federal WIC program (“food stamps”) for the entire United States ( WIC PROGRAM PARTICIPATION AND COSTS),
FYI, WIC is Women, Infants, and Children. When we talk about “food stamps”, that is generally the colloquial name for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Sometimes you see SNAP and TANF together at state/local employment/social welfare/human services agencies. TANF is Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
The total cost for food stamps last year was about $74 billion.
The hodge podge geographic and programmatic nature of our various welfare programs is one of the big reasons I personally am a fan of having one centralized, universal unemployment insurance system. But even if you do not support that policy goal, it’s important to get the scale of the numbers right. The need for food stamps is considerably higher than $6 billion annually.
http://www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/files/pd/SNAPsummary.pdf
This is an excellent point that works great when you get the “entitlement/welfare state” thingy thrown at you. The punch line that bill clinton ended welfare in favor of TANF inoculates you from the red/blue virus.
I love this paragraph! This is something that might be used to convince some middle class conservatives that we really do need to change the way that we tax the rich. Of course, I might be indulging in wishful thinking…
I’ve long been really frustrated by the fact that Hedge Fund squillionaires are only taxed at 20%, rather than at the tax rates that the peons have to pay. Sadly, I doubt many US citizens are aware of this excessively generous perk, and sadder still, there would be a significant enough minority of peons who see this as “fair and just” in the scheme of things.
Clearly, though, these wealthy parasites have gamed and rigged the system to make it nigh onto impossible to change the rules/laws/regulations, and here we are. Not only are they taxed at a very low and very unfair rate, but then these parasites use their billion$ to further their aims of impoverishing everyone else… all in the name of: the workers want “too much” and don’t work “hard enough.” Galling.
They’ve been clever enough to have their various foundations, thank tanks and whatever to push out that Ayn Randian clap trap about being “personally responsible” and “standing on your two feet” and “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.” Making it seem like, if you’re not making enough money to survive, it’s your own d*mn fault. And these Hedgies, of course, “work so hard” to they “deserve” their earnings.
Of course, all we’re seeing here is Socialism for the mega-wealthy, where these parasites have gamed the system (by buying off politicians, amongst other ruses) in order to get government programs that enrich them. They don’t “work harder” than the rest of us. They’ve just been sociopathic enough to screw everyone else whilst enhancing their coffers at everyone else’s expense.
I can’t say I’m surprised. Lets just state the obvious conclusion for the record one more time: the problems created by capitalism cannot be solved through charity, no matter how well-intentioned. People simply cannot be allowed to amass such obscene amounts of wealth, period. That’s the bottom line.
There is an additional loophole that the carry interest designation allows, avoidance of paying into Social Security, Medicare etc. Not only the loophole that caps contributions at $118.5k/yr for ordinary wages, additionally, the designation as investment income for the carry interest portions completely avoids the contributions to the safety net for disability, widowed spouses, dependents. Imagine if they made the same percentage of contributions the rest of us make, they would not have to throw as many catered parties for themselves to collect the paltry donations they make. This is double dipping tax avoidance as the carry interest cuts their income tax in half AND they avoid paying into the Federal Insurance social programs. Nice tax shelter and flimsy patina of actually caring about the less fortunate to distract attention from reforming these outrageous tax avoidance entitlements propped up by having the tax code re-written to suit them personally.
Thanks for this post. I don’t see the article as being particularly shrill. IMO, it lays out the facts as they are. How else is one to depict how at least some/most of the wealthy elite behave… and how they game the system to make so much for themselves alone.
What we see here is government welfare that benefits the mega-wealthy, who are engaged in doing whatever it takes to rip off the peons, downgrade our abilities to earn a decent, living wage (in safe, humane conditions), all whilst complaining about how “hard” they work and how “unfair” it is to tell the truth about them.
More of this, please! Keep doing your best to educate the public about how this works.
Great read.
I might add one thought on the intro.
I think this is part of the major cultural and intergenerational sea change going on underneath the easily visible surface in our society. The PR may work to an extent on more comfortable liberals, but I think the lack of authenticity is rather grating and glaring to ever larger numbers of Americans who haven’t spent the past couple decades in relative peace and prosperity (and even quite a few who have).
Far from masters of PR, the elites have completely lost touch with a huge and growing part of our population. The rate of change on that disconnect is the major story of where American political economy is going. We either openly embrace a 21st century version of the Gestapo and Stasi and so on, or at some point, something’s gotta give and we return to a more equal distribution of society’s resources.
It’s not that taxing the rich is unpopular. Rather, it is that inequality is the point of public policy for our present leadership class. Serious People on both the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ actively support policies that entrench the looting and protect the looters.
And yes, I do mean the left as well as the right. Sure, raising taxes (or cutting spending) is “austerity”. That’s a good thing. People with excess currency units should pay more in taxes/receive less in subsidies. This kind of influence – being on boards and commissions and donating money to organizations and mayors and so forth – is exactly why the ‘nonprofit’ model for JG is such a terrible idea. The kleptocrats are exactly the people who influence the important decision-making at these organizations.
the robbin’ hoodz association…
most organizations of this type are a free ride excuse for a party…there are 20 real grass root non profits that never see any sustainable funding for each of these plucked from thin air groups that get media attention for the champagne they pass out at these “wonderful” events…a sad reflection on the 4th estate…
A better name: The Sheriff of Nottingham Foundation.
flora – “The Sheriff of Nottingham Foundation” – perfect description!
I don’t know where hedge funders fit into this picture, but I find it very sobering:
“. . . Why does the 1 percent in 2013 not hold a much larger share of wealth than in 1989? The number of millionaire households in the United States is smaller, by 129,000. What happened? Even those meeting our traditional definition of wealth (a millionaire) are losing ground to the top .2 to .5 percent of America’s ultra wealthy. These ultra wealthy are among the people who funneled billions of dollars in covert money into the presidential election of 2012.
How unequal have we become, you ask? Our current wealth inequality not only exceeds that of all other industrial nations, it also exceeds that of nations like Mexico, Pakistan, and the Ivory Coast. We don’t consider these latter countries our economic peers, but in the inequality metric they are doing better than we are. Our current wealth gap is even greater than the fabled differences in wealth between ancient Rome’s Emperors and its slaves. It is becoming an epic fracture line in American society.” [Anasazi America by David E. Stuart, revised edition, 2014]
Aux armes, citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons!
Marchons! Marchons!
The Aristocracy never saw it coming!
If ever some clowns needed to be attacked and taxed it’s these guys!
Trump’s tax plan:
“Trump’s code, which he calls the “1-5-10-15 income tax plan,” is a simplistic way to fix our nation’s broken taxation system, without putting the strain on any particular group of people.
Under Trump’s tax plan, those making up to…
$30,000 per year will pay 1 percent in federal income taxes
$30,000 to $100,000 will pay 5 percent
$100,000 to $1 million will pay 10 percent
$1 million or above will pay 15 percent
Note: No deductions, no exceptions, period.
Your tax return would fit on a postcard. There would be little to audit (only “how much did you make?”) and thus 90+% of compliance costs would disappear.
Now why isn’t the media focusing on that?
Incidentally, I have not run the numbers to determine if this is revenue neutral….. but shouldn’t that be analyzed and shouldn’t the media take a good, solid look at it?
Why don’t they? Because I bet virtually everyone would like it, that’s why.”
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=230493
Like Karl said, he hasn’t run the numbers to see if it would work, but I like the part about no deductions, no exceptions.
Good article!
Lordie. You’ve never dealt with anyone who has complex financial affairs.
People who are really rich do not have a lot of W-2 (wages and salaries) as income. The determination for them of what is “income” is an art form.
Moreover, you missed that the super-rich actually pay more in taxes now than under Trump’s scheme. Their effective tax rate averages 18%.
He’s proposing to lower tax collections all across the spectrum. Tell me how you fund the Federal government with a ton lower revenues than now?
This is symptomatic of how utterly unserious a candidate he is. This is making shit up and acting as if it’s a policy.