On Thu, October 29, 1998 at 12:48:25 (-0800) Brad De Long writes:
>...has been dug out of the basement. Let me start on page 20, with
>
>"[Single parent] Jacques Cotton [paid] 19.8 percent of his income [of
>$33,500] in taxes. George and Barbara Bush's tax rate, remember, was 18.1
>percent."
>
>--As we noted before, this is the only year of the Bush presidency
>during which the Bushes paid such a low average tax rate. The cause is
>that the denominator includes royalties from _Millie's Book_, which
>the Bushes declared as income, gave away, and took a charitable
>deduction for.
I wonder what the charity was. Aid to Contras with Dependent Machetes? Seriously, though, aren't charitable deductions something that by and large only the rich can really take advantage of? Though I do remember seeing somewhere that the poorer one were, the more one tended to give, percentage-wise, of income...
>Our tax system is not as progressive as I would like. But it is
>progressive. And Barlett and Steele are trying to mask the fact that
>it is progressive.
Is this true even when you look at the *effective* tax rate?
>Page 21: "[The Federal Government] encourages people to secure an advanced
>education to qualify for jobs at companies that are not hiring or are
>paying wages that make the degree a poor economic investment."
>
>--In fact, the educational wage premium today is higher than at any
>time since the end of World War II: getting a college education is an
>extremely good economic investment.
Doesn't Jamie Galbraith's new book, *Created Unequal* show that this is not entirely true?
>Page 21: "[The Federal Government] talks of retraining the newly unemployed
>to fill high-tech jobs that don't exist."
>
>--Stagnant real wages are--according to Janet Yellen--the result not
>of the fact that new jobs are by and large bad, low-wage, low-skill
>jobs, but the result of declining real wages at old, already-existing
>jobs.
>
>Page 23: "Squeezing the American Family--Part One"
>
>--No mention of the fact that the Earned Income Tax Credit more than
>makes up for the decline in the relative value of personal exemptions
>for a typical family making less than median income.
How much below median? So are you saying that when B&S say "along with itemized or standard deductions" that EITC is part of the "standard deductions", which they do not count?
>Page 25: "If you are a middle-income [California] family, you may pay
>nearly as much in real estate taxes as a wealthy family whose home has a
>market value ten to fifteen times what yours is worth."
>
>--No mention of the fact that this is a result of the overwhelmingly-
>popular Proposition 13: ...
How do you know that this is true? How do you know that their examples do not take this into account? I remember Jonathan Kozol, in his book *Savage Inequalities* making the claim that property tax rates in rich districts tended to be less (often far less), percentage-wise, than in poor districts. The poor would pay much larger portions of their incomes and they would still fall short of the amount of money the rich could send to their schools.
>Proposition 13 was not the result (as Barlett and Steele imply) of
>nasty politicians in smoke filled rooms eager to give the rich a break
>while the rest of us aren't watching, but of a *voter* *referendum*.
Well, as long as we're implying... Proposition 13 was put on the ballot as the result of the efforts of two "conservative activists", Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann (Jarvis was a lobbyist for landlords, according to Mike Davis in *City of Quartz*, p. 182). Business loved it, as did rentiers. See http://www.dejanews.com/article/322480071 for a short essay on this one. See Davis (ibid) p. 307 for some of the disastrous effects on the school system from this. See also Mike Davis, *The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster* (Henry Holt, 1998) pp. 120-1.
>Pages 30-4: "Every so often Congress... extends a benefit reserved for
>the privileged to everyone. It never lasts. A case in point:
>retirement savings plans.... When the Tax Reform Act of 1986 was
>finally signed into law, the tax-deductible IRA disappeared for
>millions of workers."
>
>--Barlett and Steele don't seem to understand that the tax deductible
>IRA as it existed between 1981 and 1986 was a *regressive* piece of
>the tax code.
But, wasn't the contribution limited to something like one or two thousand dollars per person? How is that regressive (if I've remembered correctly), since it seems that there was a distinct (relatively low?) cap on the amount of deduction?
>But once again, enough. Barlett and Steele are *unreliable.* They don't
>*understand* what they are talking about.
I'm not quite ready to concede this. Brad, you're pretty harsh about judging people as "unreliable" before the vote really gets in. It seems to me that most of the points above are clearly (at the very least) debatable points. I certainly disagree with you when you say they don't understand what they're talking about. They may have been mistaken, or sloppy, or biased, but to totally dismiss them is, I think, clearly not warranted.
Incidentally, I do think that if Brad can convince us that they were sloppy, he's done us all a favor, as far as I'm concerned. There's no room for progressives to slip up, and shoddy information is just poison.
Bill