Your Taxes – Part 3 – Andrew Tobias

But first . . .

Are you a lawyer (or law student) who wants to help combat Republican voter suppression tactics? If so, consider joining this Facebook group.

And second . . .

David Ignatius writes:

. . . President Trump’s efforts to dress up his retreat from Syria as a victory are an embarrassment. He squandered America’s leverage, abandoned our Kurdish allies to a Turkish invasion and thereby reopened the door for a defeated enemy, the Islamic State, to resume attacks on the West. . . .

. . . Russia has dreamed for centuries of having the influence in the Middle East that it’s now gaining. This is part of the original “Great Game,” after all. How bizarre that in the end, what Russia has so desperately wanted, Trump is giving them for free.

And now . . .

Stephen Golder: “We don’t need to raise revenue, we need to cut spending. Gut the Pentagon, bring home troops from everywhere and close bases. Stop giving billions to pederast warlords in Afghanistan. Dump TSA, Homeland Security, and any number of other Forever War scams. You can bleed people to infinity but if Imperial expenses keep going up it doesn’t matter.”

→ Here is an overview of federal spending. A more thoughtful administration could reset the balance between hard power spending (that makes the world fear us) and soft power programs and policies (that make the world like us) and thereby save some money.

But what I want to post today, as we discuss taxes (earlier this month I argued that, yes, the best off should pay more — but we should thank them, not demonize them), are these excerpts from a recent Nick Kristof column:

. . . Donald Trump promised struggling working-class voters that he heard their frustrations and would act.

He did: He pushed through a tax cut that made income inequality worse.

. . . That’s the rot in our system: Great wealth has translated into immense political power, which is then leveraged to multiply that wealth and power all over again — and also multiply the suffering of those at the bottom. This is a legal corruption that President Trump magnified but that predated him and will outlast him; this is America’s cancer.

. . . As a society, instead of playing Robin Hood to smooth out the inequities, we’ve played the Sheriff of Nottingham. Lawrence Summers, the economist and former Treasury secretary, has calculated that if we had the same income distribution today as we had in 1979, the bottom 80 percent would have about an extra $1 trillion each year and the top 1 percent would have about $1 trillion less.

. . . Two M.I.T. economists, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, demolish the traditional arguments against higher taxes on the wealthy in an incisive book coming out next month, “Good Economics for Hard Times.” While major league sports teams have salary caps that limit athletes’ pay, Banerjee and Duflo note that no one argues “that players would play harder if only they were paid a little (or a lot) more. Everybody agrees that the drive to be best is sufficient.”

Considerable evidence suggests that the same is true of C.E.O.s, and that higher tax rates don’t depress effort. In Switzerland, a shift in tax timing meant that the Swiss were not taxed for one year. This tax holiday, which they knew of in advance, turned out to have no impact on how hard people worked, Banerjee and Duflo write.

“High marginal income tax rates, applied only to very high incomes, are a perfectly sensible way to limit the explosion of top wealth inequality,” Banerjee and Duflo write.

There are legitimate concerns about tax evasion, but it would help if the I.R.S. focused its audits less on impoverished Americans claiming the earned-income tax credit and more on wealthy people with murky assets. It’s ridiculous that the county in all America with the highest audit rate is Humphreys County, Miss., which is poor, rural and three-quarters black. . . .

→ Yes, it is. Reagan, Bush 43, and now Trump have slashed taxes on those best off and sent inequality — and the National Debt — soaring.

Vote Democrat. And if you can, help fund the massive turnout we need to get the country back on track. Money now, with almost 50 weeks until early voting begins, starts the organizing snowball rolling near the top of the hill — and is thus so much more effective than the exact same money spent a year from now.