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You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Can We Round That “Bottom Half” to “47%”?

Can We Round That “Bottom Half” to “47%”?

by Anne Laurie|  January 21, 20149:00 pm| 62 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Decline and Fall, Jump! You Fuckers!

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From the LATimes:

BERLIN — As business and political leaders gather in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss the improving world economy, new evidence emerged about how much the rich have become richer — and how much further the poor are falling behind.

The 85 richest people on Earth now have the same amount of wealth as the bottom half of the global population, according to a report released Monday by the British humanitarian group Oxfam International…

The bottom half of the population — about 3.5 billion people — account for about $1.7 trillion, or about 0.7 percent of the world’s wealth, according to the Oxfam report, titled “Working for the Few.” That’s the same amount of wealth attributed to the world’s 85 richest people.

Those wealthy elite are a small part of the richest 1 percent of the world’s population, which combined has amassed about 46 percent of the world’s wealth, or $110 trillion, according to the report. The top 1 percent had 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the population…

In a report last week, the World Economic Forum said widening income inequality was the risk most likely to cause serious damage in the next decade. President Obama recently called the expanding gap between rich and poor a bigger threat to the U.S. economy than the budget deficit. A Gallup poll released Monday found two-thirds of Americans were dissatisfied with the way income and wealth are distributed in the nation.

The percentage of income held by the richest 1 percent in the U.S. has grown nearly 150 percent from 1980 through 2012. That small elite has received 95 percent of wealth created since 2009, after the financial crisis, while the bottom 90 percent of Americans have become poorer, Oxfam said.

Of course, I’m sure those 85 people are lovely human beings, kind to their friends, personally generous, and beloved by their families. But still…

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62Comments

  1. 1.

    RaflW

    January 21, 2014 at 9:05 pm

    In a report last week, the World Economic Forum said widening income inequality was the risk most likely to cause serious damage in the next decade.

    And when they say damage, I’m not sure they mean what I think it means: pitchforks, storming the castles of commerce, etc.

    If the rich really do think they can pull that far away from the rest and pay no consequences in social stability, they will find they are wrong. Maybe not right away. But this disparity is not sustainable, at least not alongside democracy and openness.

    Which is the flipside. Severe repression and domination of the poor is the other path – the nasty, evil path to “stability.” Also not sustainable long term.

  2. 2.

    cathyx

    January 21, 2014 at 9:05 pm

    I wish they would remember that they can’t take it with them.

  3. 3.

    schrodinger's cat

    January 21, 2014 at 9:06 pm

    Meanwhile conservative columnists deny the existence of inequality, or if they acknowledge it they blame the poor for it.

  4. 4.

    schrodinger's cat

    January 21, 2014 at 9:09 pm

    Meanwhile conservative columnists deny the existence of inequality, or if they acknowledge it at all they blame the poor for it.

  5. 5.

    Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader

    January 21, 2014 at 9:10 pm

    85 sounds like a very manageable number of executions after the glorious revolution.

  6. 6.

    cathyx

    January 21, 2014 at 9:10 pm

    I just don’t get it. You’ve got enough money to do what you want, when you want, go anywhere you want and buy anything you want, but it’s just not enough.

  7. 7.

    p.a.

    January 21, 2014 at 9:12 pm

    B-b-b-but who will support the arts and charities? Not Levellers!

  8. 8.

    Chris

    January 21, 2014 at 9:17 pm

    Of course, I’m sure those 85 people are lovely human beings, kind to their friends, personally generous, and beloved by their families. But still…

    Hitler was nice to his dog.

    (Oh, shut up, Godwin).

  9. 9.

    siciliandish

    January 21, 2014 at 9:17 pm

    Proof positive reaganomics works; designed to transfer wealth from the bottom to the top. Mission Accomplished!

  10. 10.

    raven

    January 21, 2014 at 9:18 pm

    Frank McCloud: He knows what he wants. Don’t you, Rocco?
    Johnny Rocco: Sure.
    (James Temple: What’s that?)
    FM: Tell him, Rocco.
    JR: Well, I want uh…
    FM: He wants more, don’t you, Rocco?
    JR: Yeah. That’s it. More. That’s right! I want more!
    (James Temple: Will you ever get enough?)
    FM: Will you, Rocco?
    JR: Well, I never have. =

  11. 11.

    Elizabelle

    January 21, 2014 at 9:19 pm

    OT: Yippee. Virginia Democrats retained AG Mark Herring’s State Senate seat. Jennifer Wexton won decisively, on a snowy and blustery day, in today’s special election.

    Recount upcoming for Lt. Governor Ralph Northam’s senate seat near Norfolk. Democrat won by nine votes, perilously thin lead.

  12. 12.

    kindness

    January 21, 2014 at 9:20 pm

    I know of but don’t really see all those folk in 3rd world countries scratching out subsistence lives or worse. So this 85 v 1/2 the world is huge but….I guess I can comprehend it better when the comparison is stuff I know better, like comparing all Americans & what not.

    I wonder if any of those 85 people feel embaressed by their wealth? Probably not.

  13. 13.

    Sourmash

    January 21, 2014 at 9:21 pm

    I used to live in Aspen, CO, and am back here for the first time in 25 years on vacation. I found a “Persian lamb’s wool coat” in a store here for $23,000!! My car barely costs that much and this was an item that will wear out, IF they actually wear it. At least 6 Ferarris pulled up to the hotel at the bottom of Aspen mountain after skiing. If people knew how the richest live and the frivolities they spend their money on, the pitchforks would probably stay in the shed. Does anyone really care?

  14. 14.

    Belafon

    January 21, 2014 at 9:26 pm

    @Elizabelle: I think this bodes well for November. Democrats can turn out to vote.

  15. 15.

    Baud

    January 21, 2014 at 9:28 pm

    @Elizabelle:

    Part of Wexton’s strong performance can be attributed to an enthusiastic and well-coordinated “get out the vote” effort from Wexton’s campaign and Virginia Democrats. Wexton supporters were quick to spread the word Monday and Tuesday that, given the inclement weather, they’d be providing rides to voters int he 33rd District.

  16. 16.

    Belafon

    January 21, 2014 at 9:32 pm

    @Baud: Well-coordinated Democrats?!! They must have been imported from the parallel universe Peter Bishop was from.

  17. 17.

    jl

    January 21, 2014 at 9:35 pm

    Dean Baker, one of the economists named in AL’s link has a wry post on Davos

    Andrew Ross Sorkin: Top Executives Run Their Companies to Reduce Inequality
    http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/andrew-ross-sorkin-top-executives-run-their-companies-to-reduce-inequality

  18. 18.

    Baud

    January 21, 2014 at 9:36 pm

    @Belafon:

    I’m scared. Quick, start a flame war.

  19. 19.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    January 21, 2014 at 9:37 pm

    @cathyx: It’s not the absolute number that they care about, or how much they could spend in a year, it’s where they rank with their peers. Kinda like: “I’m smarter and work harder and have better ideas than Ellison and Ballmer, I should make more than they do, too. Otherwise, I’m being disrespected.”

    New Yorker:

    Faith in disclosure has been crucial to the regulation of executive pay since the nineteen-thirties, when companies were first required to reveal those figures. More recently, rules have made companies detail the size and the structure of compensation packages and have enforced transparency about the kinds of comparisons they rely on to determine salaries. The business press, meanwhile, now rigorously tracks executive pay. The result is that shareholders today know far more about C.E.O. compensation than ever before. There’s only one problem: even as companies are disclosing more and more, executive pay keeps going up and up.

    This isn’t a coincidence: the drive for transparency has actually helped fuel the spiralling salaries. For one thing, it gives executives a good idea of how much they can get away with asking for. A more crucial reason, though, has to do with the way boards of directors set salaries. As the corporate-governance experts Charles Elson and Craig Ferrere write in a recent paper, boards at most companies use what’s called “peer benchmarking.” They look at the C.E.O. salaries at peer-group firms, and then peg their C.E.O.’s pay to the fiftieth, seventy-fifth, or ninetieth percentile of the peer group—never lower. This leads to the so-called Lake Wobegon effect: every C.E.O. gets treated as above average. With all the other companies following the same process, salaries ratchet inexorably higher. “Relying on peer-group comparisons, the way boards do, mathematically guarantees that pay is going to go up,” Elson told me. “Higher pay becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.”

    On top of this, peer-group comparisons aren’t always honest: boards can be too cozy with C.E.O.s and may tweak the comparisons to justify overpaying. A recent study by the labor economist Ron Laschever shows that boards tend to include as peers companies that are bigger than they are and that pay their C.E.O.s more. The system is also skewed by so-called “leapfroggers,” the few C.E.O.s in a given year who, whether by innate brilliance or by dumb luck, end up earning astronomical salaries. Those big paydays reset the baseline expectations for everyone else.

    It’s a crappy system and indicates corporate boards aren’t doing their jobs, but that’s the way it is at the moment.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  20. 20.

    jl

    January 21, 2014 at 9:42 pm

    @jl:

    Sorry, punched ‘submit’ before I finished. Bakers links to a NYT column by Andrew Sorkin, which says that some of the very richest and powerful gazillionaires apparently consider Davos an unimportant pretentious meet-up of riff-raff. I guess they consider the entrance price of $70,000 for such a silly affair a bad buy, what with having to walk down distressingly chilly and declasse Davos streets to get from one venue to another (edit: and hobnob with a distressingly diverse set of people many of whom are not really rich or important at all)

    Some Masters of the Universse send underlings, and other companies ignore it. Sorkin implies that maybe this year’s theme of inequality makes Davos even less appealing than usual, and wonders about the bad ‘appearance’ of ignoring this year’s festivities.

    And Baker jeers ‘Appearances? Appearances? We talking about appearances?’ (paraphrasing Baker very loosely)

  21. 21.

    Elizabelle

    January 21, 2014 at 9:43 pm

    @Belafon:
    @Baud:

    Yes. Voters were getting sick of seeing volunteers at the doors.

    Jennifer Wexton ran as a flat-out liberal Democrat who “would fight Tea Party extremists in Richmond” and won handily.

    Virginia is an exciting place, and midterms straight ahead.

  22. 22.

    Baud

    January 21, 2014 at 9:46 pm

    @Elizabelle:

    But, but, but…Obamacare is our albatross. What happened?

  23. 23.

    SiubhanDuinne

    January 21, 2014 at 9:47 pm

    I mentioned in an earlier thread (can’t remember which or whose thread, so can’t check without great invonience) that President Obama will meet this spring with the Pope. From what I’ve seen, it sounds as though it will be a proper meeting, not (or not merely) a formal Papal “audience.” There’s so much, especially in income inequality, that they have in common, that I am really hoping for an actual outcome from this conversation, not just platitudes.

    Dream on, I suppose.

  24. 24.

    RepubAnon

    January 21, 2014 at 9:48 pm

    It would be interesting to compare the total taxes paid by the top 85 versus the bottom 50% I’m guessing at least 50 of the top 85 don’t pay any taxes… and the rest complain bitterly about how much they do pay in taxes.

  25. 25.

    Elizabelle

    January 21, 2014 at 9:48 pm

    @Baud:

    I think the expected snowstorm might have helped. Federal government was off, kids out of school, voters knew they should get to the polls earlier in the day. Heaviest snow expected mid to late afternoon, and it wasn’t that bad. (4-6 inches, but snowplows out in force.)

    And the roads were driveable throughout, as long as one drove gently.

  26. 26.

    Yatsuno

    January 21, 2014 at 9:50 pm

    Three things:

    1) Tax them. Tax them at their source of wealth. Financial instruments and carryover interest. Institute a transactional tax. Then redistribute that downwards.

    2) Up the amount of estate taxes way beyond what they are now. This can even be done with levels to get around the whines of families losing farms (which happens very little these days anyway). Anything about 20 million is 40%. Anything about 50 million is 50 percent. Anything above 100 million is 70 percent. No exceptions, no hiding in blind trusts.

    3) Institute, if not a guaranteed income, an easy resource for poor to get money either through microloans through the Post Office or some other method. There are ways to get the money out, but it has to be equitable. And if people decide not to work, SO FUCKING WHAT??? What skin is that off your nose?

    I’m sure there’s other ideas and obviously these are not fleshed out and impossible to enact with the current make-up of Congress. But things can change and things can be changed…

  27. 27.

    ericblair

    January 21, 2014 at 9:50 pm

    @I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:

    It’s not the absolute number that they care about, or how much they could spend in a year, it’s where they rank with their peers. Kinda like: “I’m smarter and work harder and have better ideas than Ellison and Ballmer, I should make more than they do, too. Otherwise, I’m being disrespected.”

    It’s whether they can make more than that asshole across the bay; it’s not having that little part of the brain that says “enough, we’re done now”, and it’s not having the imagination to figure out what the hell else they should be doing with their lives besides raking it in year after year for no fucking rational reason whatsoever.

    If you kept amassing stuff well beyond any possible need of yourself or your children or your children’s children, then you’re called a hoarding obsessive nutcase, except if it’s money. Then it’s perfectly noble and praiseworthy.

    ETA: Congratulations to Wexton for winning in VA.

  28. 28.

    Baud

    January 21, 2014 at 9:51 pm

    @Elizabelle:

    Clearly, Obama shut down the government to help Wexton.

  29. 29.

    Mike G

    January 21, 2014 at 9:52 pm

    DAVOS = Discussion About Various Opportunities for Stealing

  30. 30.

    Redshift

    January 21, 2014 at 9:54 pm

    @Baud: Yup! With my new job, I wasn’t able to put in a lot of work on the campaign, but I was out canvassing on Saturday, and the campaign office was completely mobbed.

    We’ve actually done well in special elections over the years in Northern Virginia, because low turnout means volunteer labor trumps money. But this was good, and the results in November make me hopeful for 2014.

  31. 31.

    Elizabelle

    January 21, 2014 at 9:55 pm

    @Baud:

    Obamacare not mentioned per se, but Jennifer strongly supports Medicaid expansion (a key Terry McAuliffe issue), so Virginia can have its own health exchange. That would be Obamacare.

    Jennifer Wexton’s big issues were women’s health (no one is going to forget Transvaginal Bob and Crazy Ass Ken Cuccinelli for a long time), education, transportation, and voting rights: more early voting and absentee voting without having to provide an explanation.

    She will be terrific. Can see her as a future Attorney General or whatever she chooses.

    A warm glow on a freezing Virginia night.

  32. 32.

    Elizabelle

    January 21, 2014 at 9:56 pm

    @Baud:

    FLOTUS called in the snowstorm. Personally.

  33. 33.

    Petorado

    January 21, 2014 at 9:56 pm

    None of these 85 richest people has the value of over 41 million of their fellow brethren. They don’t produce the work of more than 41 million people every day and each of the uber wealthy don’t do more good than over 41 million of their fellow planetary citizens.

    Money, and wealth, is not a sign of value, it is a sign of control. Money is not speech. It is not value. It is control. What is being measured in dollars is not income — the amount of valued work produced by each person, it’s is the amount of control they have over this planet and their fellow denizens. These folks aren’t “worth” that much to this planet, they just have that much more ability to control the lives of the rest of us.

  34. 34.

    Linnaeus

    January 21, 2014 at 9:57 pm

    @I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:

    It’s not the absolute number that they care about, or how much they could spend in a year, it’s where they rank with their peers. Kinda like: “I’m smarter and work harder and have better ideas than Ellison and Ballmer, I should make more than they do, too. Otherwise, I’m being disrespected.”

    I think it runs even deeper than that. As Chinatown explains it:

    Jake Gittes: How much are you worth?

    Noah Cross: I have no idea. How much do you want?

    Jake Gittes: I just wanna know what you’re worth. More than 10 million?

    Noah Cross: Oh my, yes!

    Jake Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What could you buy that you can’t already afford?

    Noah Cross: The future, Mr. Gittes! The future…

    It’s about power. Nietzsche may have had a point there.

  35. 35.

    Linnaeus

    January 21, 2014 at 9:59 pm

    @Petorado:

    Money, and wealth, is not a sign of value, it is a sign of control. Money is not speech. It is not value. It is control. What is being measured in dollars is not income — the amount of valued work produced by each person, it’s is the amount of control they have over this planet and their fellow denizens. These folks aren’t “worth” that much to this planet, they just have that much more ability to control the lives of the rest of us.

    Yep.

  36. 36.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    January 21, 2014 at 10:00 pm

    @Elizabelle: It was an excellent result today.

    Her TV ad was amazingly direct. Unfortunately, the only place I’ve been able to find it on the web is on a Republican site – here.

    Here’s hoping Lewis can keep Northam’s seat, too.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  37. 37.

    max

    January 21, 2014 at 10:00 pm

    @Belafon: I think this bodes well for November. Democrats can turn out to vote.

    Sure. However, the Quinnipiac poll has the congressional Dems just off of their all-time low approval ratings (27%). However, the Republicans are at their all-time lows (17%).

    Congress: not real popular at the moment. Looks like the tenth round of a heavyweight brawl – both sides are beat all to hell.

    max
    [‘That said, 2014 will not be 2010. Looks like 2012 again, really.’]

  38. 38.

    Mike G

    January 21, 2014 at 10:00 pm

    I’m sure those 85 people are lovely human beings, kind to their friends, personally generous, and beloved by their families.

    In the documentary ‘Born Rich’, a doorman at 740 Park Avenue says Charles Koch is the nastiest and cheapest asshole toward the help of anyone in the entire building. Color me surprised.

  39. 39.

    GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)

    January 21, 2014 at 10:01 pm

    Cornerstone says this discussion is due to the Occupy movement. Yeah, the POTUS and the Pope are going to discuss income inequality because of Occupy.

    Fucking dumbass.

  40. 40.

    Redshift

    January 21, 2014 at 10:01 pm

    @Elizabelle: Yeah. In the earlier special election, in a district that Obama won by about the same margin as this one, the Democrat ran on bipartisanship and such, and only won by nine votes (if that survives the recount.) Weston ran on clear Democratic and anti-teabagger issues, and won handily.

    Man, i hope Democratic campaign strategists take note.

  41. 41.

    dexwood

    January 21, 2014 at 10:02 pm

    @cathyx:

    The most accurate summary of current events I’ve ever read.

  42. 42.

    patrick II

    January 21, 2014 at 10:04 pm

    @cathyx:
    Sharks have to keep swimming forward or they die.

  43. 43.

    PurpleGirl

    January 21, 2014 at 10:36 pm

    Avedon Carol has had this quote on her blog for a little over a week. I’ve wanted to post it here; this seems like a good thread for it:

    Fran Lebowitz: “No one earns $100 Million. You steal $100 Million. People earn $10 an hour. People earn $40,000 a year. “Earn” means work. Okay.”

  44. 44.

    GregB

    January 21, 2014 at 10:36 pm

    ?

  45. 45.

    mclaren

    January 21, 2014 at 10:42 pm

    Meanwhile, the rich and their robots are about to make half the world’s jobs disappear.

    This will not end well.

    Remember that grainy black-and-white footage of the corpses of Mussolini and his mistress hanging from lampposts in Italy in 1946? Methinks we’ll be seeing more of that, but with billionaires instead of fascisti, by and by…

  46. 46.

    danielx

    January 21, 2014 at 10:46 pm

    @RaflW:

    Severe repression and domination of the poor is the other path – the nasty, evil path to “stability.” Also not sustainable long term.

    Perhaps so, but it sure enough can majorly suck for a lot of people in the short term. Also depends on what one means by long term – Somoza was in power for twelve years, Pinochet for seventeen.

    @jl:

    Like any of those guys gives a flying fuck about what Andrew Ross Sorkin, much less the proles, think about anything

    @cathyx:

    Once you get to a certain point, there’s no such thing as ‘enough’. Money isn’t a means to an end or a medium of exchange, it’s more like a way of keeping score. I mean, look at the noticeably few big league financial schmucks who have been indicted on fraud charges and the like. I’d bet that all those guys had a net worth that would make you or I blink, at least before they were charged. Enough to make me, at least, think “entirely aside from the moral aspect, why would I jeopardize my freedom, fortune and future when I have enough to put my kids through school and live very comfortably for the rest of my life?” They don’t think that way though, because they’re mostly hypercompetitive sociopathic assholes for one, and second because they never think they’ll get caught, and third, if they do get caught they can buy their way out of trouble. “What’s it going to cost to make this problem go away?”

  47. 47.

    mclaren

    January 21, 2014 at 10:47 pm

    @RaflW:

    And when they say damage, I’m not sure they mean what I think it means: pitchforks, storming the castles of commerce, etc.

    More likely use of military weapons against civilians by paramilitary police forces and homegrown stasi like the DHS. Do you have any idea of the sheer quantity of military weaponry being sold or leased or just given away by the Pentagon to local police forces?

  48. 48.

    Chris

    January 21, 2014 at 11:05 pm

    @Yatsuno:

    OMG. YES.

    @mclaren:

    Yep, sadly, I’d have to go with that explanation. As a rich man from another age once said, you can always hire half the poor to kill the other half.

  49. 49.

    Villago Delenda Est

    January 21, 2014 at 11:15 pm

    Of course, I’m sure those 85 people are lovely human beings, kind to their friends, personally generous, and beloved by their families.

    Reinhard Heydrich was charming and polite at all those parties in 30’s Germany. Cultured, well spoken, athletic, good looking.

    A really lovely human being.

    Remember that grainy black-and-white footage of the corpses of Mussolini and his mistress hanging from lampposts in Italy in 1946?

    1945, and that’s the way one deals with these assholes. They are parasites. Vampires. Deal with them accordingly. No mercy. No quarter. It’s guaranteed they will show you none. They’re the scorpion. It’s in their nature.

  50. 50.

    Original Lee

    January 22, 2014 at 12:04 am

    Just because we have a masochistic streak, Original Spouse and I calculated our inflation-adjusted incomes from Before Kids. Our gross income then is just $1,000 less than our gross income now. Talk about stagnant wages! Original Spouse pointed out that this is why we have had to find places to cut our household budget the last few years. We’re running out of places to cut, though. Maybe we need to toss the kids off the back of the sleigh.

  51. 51.

    Bubblegum Tate

    January 22, 2014 at 12:29 am

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    The wingers I know who mention it do so with the angle of “what, so income inequality is a bad thing? You think everybody should have the exact same amount of money, don’t you, Comrade CastroMao?”

  52. 52.

    The Other Bob

    January 22, 2014 at 6:51 am

    @Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:

    85 executions a little redistribution and “poof” half the world doubles their worth. How could this situation cause instability?

  53. 53.

    kindness

    January 22, 2014 at 7:13 am

    @RepubAnon:

    It would be interesting to compare the total taxes paid by the top 85 versus the bottom 50%

    What is the going tax rate in Galt?

  54. 54.

    Alien Radio

    January 22, 2014 at 7:25 am

    Poeple still misunderstand what money is, it has no value it is a meausuring stick, it is the quanta of economic decision making, saying there’s no money is like saying there’s not enough inches. The person who described money hoarding as hoarding control, has it bang on this is where citizen controlled fiat money has an advantage.

    Too much concentrated in a certain proportion of your population? double the amount in circulation and give it to people who will spend it you have effectively reduced the proportion of economic decision making amongst the hoarding proportion of the population by 50%.

    To control inflation you use taxes, although the inflation itself acts as a tax on hoarded wealth you still need taxation to destroy money that’s been created. the idea is to increase the velocity of money, because that’s the only thing with value, not the money itself. the best way to think about this is to imagine money that decays in value if you don’t spent it, I’ve seen some ideas that use crypto currencies that have the decay mechanism, thus encouraging spending. My big problem with the likes of bit coin was the inability to vary the quantity in circulation and it’s deflationary nature. i.e. encouraging rent collection on the medium of exchange, pretty much exactly the problem we have at the moment. I’m hoping a rentless fork of a crypto currency will prove fit for purpose.

  55. 55.

    boatboy_srq

    January 22, 2014 at 9:34 am

    Those wealthy elite are a small part of the richest 1 percent of the world’s population, which combined has amassed about 46 percent of the world’s wealth, or $110 trillion, according to the report.

    I can’t help thinking that if Romney had said “46% of the dollars will always vote for us” instead of his “47% [of the electorate]” line, while it wouldn’t have sounded any better would at least have been less dishonest.

  56. 56.

    Rob in CT

    January 22, 2014 at 9:45 am

    @Yatsuno:

    IMO, we should tax inheritance, not estates.

    Examples: inheritance taxed starting at $500k, with progressive marginal rates. $500k-$1MM taxed at 10%. $1MM-$2MM at 15%, $2MM-$3MM at 20%. $3MM-$4MM at 25%. $4MM-$5MM at 30% and so on all the way up to 90%.

    1) You die with $5 million in assets. You distribute this to 5 heirs. They each get $950k, paying $50k each in tax.

    2) You die with $5MM in assets and give it to 1 heir. That heir ends up with $4,050,000, having paid $950k in tax.

    Obviously, one can quibble with the precise numbers, but I think the idea is sound. This would provide a strong incentive to spread around the wealth. We want to keep it moving. Collecting it as tax revenue and redistributing it is fine and all, but for me the key thing is to keep it moving around, instead of having it pile up in hoards.

  57. 57.

    hoodie

    January 22, 2014 at 9:52 am

    I’d be a more than a little paranoid If I were one of the 85 people who are richer than half the world’s population, safety in numbers and all that. I guess the question is how long the other 49.99999999999999 will be motivated to protect them. The real reckoning may come when those who are deluding themselves into thinking their families are still on the upward mobility track watch their children slip into poverty as the cannibalized economy crumbles around them. Sure, billionaire financed propaganda can get them to scapegoat the poor for a while, but that’s kind of like getting blood from a stone and gets even dicier when the poor are their offspring. The behavior of the 1% ultimately seems stupid and self-destructive, proof positive that modern capitalism doesn’t make the cream rise to the top. More like turds.

  58. 58.

    Interrobang

    January 22, 2014 at 10:53 am

    @Rob in CT: This is probably not a bad idea, although the whole concept could use some escape valves. I know a guy in England who’s going to be in bad trouble if both his parents die before they can sell their (ancient decrepit creaky) house, as due to the housing bubble over there, it’s worth about three quarters of a million pounds (!!), and there’s no effing way he’ll be able to pay the estate taxes on it. He’s anticipating some real financial difficulty, and I doubt it’s doing anything good for his ongoing struggle with his state of mind.

    This is not a rich guy, and his parents were never anything other than working class. They bought this heap of a 200-year-old house in a badly economically depressed area in the early 80s for next to nothing, and now its book value is astronomical. Whether they’d actually be able to sell it for what the tax authorities would say it is worth is an entirely other question, though.

  59. 59.

    Rob in CT

    January 22, 2014 at 12:24 pm

    @Interrobang:

    Well, perhaps allow payments to be strung out over multiple years. Or simply allow for a grace period with regard to taxes owed on real estate.

    Here’s the thing. The system I layed out has progressive taxes. The taxes start quite low (10% on $500k-$1MM) and ramp up. Quibble with my example numbers if you like, but seriously, if you inherit $1MM, you should be able to come up with $50k in taxes. Even if you have to sell a house. Re-mortage the bloody thing if needs be.

  60. 60.

    Al

    January 22, 2014 at 1:13 pm

    “Of course, I’m sure those 85 people are lovely human beings, kind to their friends, personally generous, and beloved by their families. But still…”

    No, they’re all pretty much a bag of dicks.

  61. 61.

    Glenn I

    January 22, 2014 at 4:24 pm

    If you could go to war and in that war there were 85 people who lost everything – oh, but maybe a million dollars apiece – and 3.5 billion people who gained significantly – that would probably be the war that harmed the fewest and helped the most in all human history – all human history combined, I think.

  62. 62.

    Jamie

    January 23, 2014 at 12:05 am

    AAH, that Reagan legacy marches on

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