Sunday, August 22, 2010

There's one for you, 19 for me


Sorry George, though so much of the Beatles' work is equal in my eyes, this short New Yorker article make the case that not all of the rich are equal to one another, and that we need a tax system that reflects that.


2 comments:

sirpaul said...

great piece man! and thanks for introducing that video--i sat through the first minute or so, but then just skipped to the song. i wonder how best to implement this tax plan (for example, start with the super-rich, eg. $5M-plus maybe. what do you think is a reasonable counter-argument to more (and more efficient) tax brackets?

David Guzman said...

The other question is at what rate do we tax the richest earners? We used to have a 91% tax rate in this country; I highly doubt that we could go back above 60% for anyone. I think $5M at 50% would be good.

I think that one counter-argument (though maybe not a reasonable one) is to say that we should not punish the rich for getting where they've gotten by taxing them so high--for some reason I think that the average person can sometimes be duped into sympathy for that. Also, the idea that these successful people need there money to run our economy often convinces many people.