Dell-iberately Misunderstanding the Margins
Billionaire Michael Dell doesn't like AOC's proposal to hike the highest marginal tax rate to 70%. His reasons why not were mostly addressed and destroyed by an economist on the panel who pointed out that the United States had that rate for quite a while during a time when growth was quite strong(*).
But one claim he made stuck out to me: He asserted that he donated more to his charitable foundation than the new tax rate would take from him.
This... ran counter to my general understanding of human nature, so I looked it up. I can't make a perfect comparison, since Forbes gives some fraction that it doesn't really explain. I might, for example, be looking at lifetime earnings here, whereas income tax is (obviously) a fraction of yearly earnings. But the number Forbes gives as a fraction of charitable giving is 5%.
I don't think Dell gives as much as he thinks he does. Or, rather, as much as he wants us to think that he does.
He also says that he trusts his own ability to spend money over that of the government -- which is ridiculous. Since war is the only collective action the United States seems to understand, let's say we needed to fight a war. Do we really believe that the voluntary contributions of billionaires would fund the effort better than taxing the public(**)? (Or any other real issue that we all pay for: Education, criminal justice, climate change, infrastructure maintenance, et cetera, et cetera ...)
There's a lot of false rhetoric out there meant to make us agreeable to the idea that rich people should be allowed to hoard their wealth. "Taxes take away money that people would otherwise give to charities" is a big one, and one that can be shown to be trivially, utterly false when looking at charitable giving and taxation in history, and how poverty only really started to decline in this country when public programs got involved. (An excellent book on the subject is Salvation in the Slums by Norris Magnuson. Not only does the author meticulously document countless social workers begging for government involvement as the nineteenth century crossed over into the twentieth, but he also shows a lot of quotes that mendacious tomes like Marvin Olansky's The Tragedy of American Compassion like to cherry-pick in context to show that they're not saying what Olansky, Graham, et al. like to pretend that they said.)
The super-rich have accumulated a lot of power and wealth over the last forty years, and they're not going to give up any of it easily. If we want better economic justice, it's going to be an ugly fight. Better to know your facts.
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(*) Though it is somewhat unsettling that the woman who claimed that the United States only had a marginal tax rate at or above 70% "briefly, in the eighties" is the economics correspondent of the Washington Post. Sweet, merciful crap. So, so, so wrong, and so completely unlikely to be called out on her bullshit.
(Of course, the entire reason she's there is to throw softball questions and to be on the side of the rich. But still.)
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(**) In the name of completeness, I should point out that Rome largely won the Punic wars by having rich families contribute voluntarily. It turned out that Carthage's rich families weren't as generous.
So the idea of voluntary contribution of the rich to a major social issue has been tested, and it works... as long as your opponent is also doing that and failing.
But one claim he made stuck out to me: He asserted that he donated more to his charitable foundation than the new tax rate would take from him.
This... ran counter to my general understanding of human nature, so I looked it up. I can't make a perfect comparison, since Forbes gives some fraction that it doesn't really explain. I might, for example, be looking at lifetime earnings here, whereas income tax is (obviously) a fraction of yearly earnings. But the number Forbes gives as a fraction of charitable giving is 5%.
I don't think Dell gives as much as he thinks he does. Or, rather, as much as he wants us to think that he does.
He also says that he trusts his own ability to spend money over that of the government -- which is ridiculous. Since war is the only collective action the United States seems to understand, let's say we needed to fight a war. Do we really believe that the voluntary contributions of billionaires would fund the effort better than taxing the public(**)? (Or any other real issue that we all pay for: Education, criminal justice, climate change, infrastructure maintenance, et cetera, et cetera ...)
There's a lot of false rhetoric out there meant to make us agreeable to the idea that rich people should be allowed to hoard their wealth. "Taxes take away money that people would otherwise give to charities" is a big one, and one that can be shown to be trivially, utterly false when looking at charitable giving and taxation in history, and how poverty only really started to decline in this country when public programs got involved. (An excellent book on the subject is Salvation in the Slums by Norris Magnuson. Not only does the author meticulously document countless social workers begging for government involvement as the nineteenth century crossed over into the twentieth, but he also shows a lot of quotes that mendacious tomes like Marvin Olansky's The Tragedy of American Compassion like to cherry-pick in context to show that they're not saying what Olansky, Graham, et al. like to pretend that they said.)
The super-rich have accumulated a lot of power and wealth over the last forty years, and they're not going to give up any of it easily. If we want better economic justice, it's going to be an ugly fight. Better to know your facts.
---
(*) Though it is somewhat unsettling that the woman who claimed that the United States only had a marginal tax rate at or above 70% "briefly, in the eighties" is the economics correspondent of the Washington Post. Sweet, merciful crap. So, so, so wrong, and so completely unlikely to be called out on her bullshit.
(Of course, the entire reason she's there is to throw softball questions and to be on the side of the rich. But still.)
---
(**) In the name of completeness, I should point out that Rome largely won the Punic wars by having rich families contribute voluntarily. It turned out that Carthage's rich families weren't as generous.
So the idea of voluntary contribution of the rich to a major social issue has been tested, and it works... as long as your opponent is also doing that and failing.
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