Hi everyone, ♪ look at this '
graph ♪, then look at the graph on total tax rates I posted above. Then think about how one factor depressing wage growth for a generation has been the skyrocketing of employer health-insurance premiums. Then knock together a tumbrel.
Also, read this
massive expose (disclosure: too long for me) entitled
"Welcome to Coffeyville, Kansas, where the judge has no law degree, debt collectors get a cut of the bail, and Americans are watching their lives — and liberty — disappear in the pursuit of medical debt collection." I can't tell you what to do then.
Critically, the analysis I referenced factors not just the "1%" but the 0.01% - and the Slate article notes, "moreover, as Greenberg admits, tax rates on top 0.1 percent have fallen by about one-fifth since their 1950s heights" - and the very richest 400 households (0.00...1%); their effective tax rates are much diminished. It is convenient that Greenberg from the Slate article uses data from Saez & Zucman just as the new article I linked does, because it helps reinforce the same point. To say that the high marginal tax rates for earned income did not affect many people has little meaning, because as we see the people who
were affected felt the full force of the high tax rates, paying the vast majority of their income in taxes. Now these tax rates do not exist, the number and proportion of households who
would be affected by their existence is orders of magnitude greater, and the truly wealthy make off astonishingly well. What inferences do you draw from this information?
Support redistributive policies? I don't see why you would treat this as some inscrutable mystery. From a rational perspective it's very little to ask, unless it gets to the tumbrels phase.
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