To add one more banal observation on top of another (as per a recent WaPo article I read), the extent to which both sides of the standard political spectrum feel the need to cling to parts of MLK's ideas just displays the strength of national civic religion - and I see it as a win for civility in general.
To the extent someone may disagree with King - be it his views on class solidarity in favor of a kind of racial maximalism akin to standard woke movements, or his views of material redistribution and egalitarianism - the fact that the disagreement centers King, and that the side seen as more exemplifying his message is correct, is a win for progress.
The WSJ piece is far more reasonable, if only because MLK was a man of his time. His views on homosexuality, for example, would today be almost as far from “woke” as could be imagined. In a letter to a young man asking for advice on his homosexuality, King responded,
“Your problem is not at all an uncommon one. However, it does require careful attention. The type of feeling that you have toward boys is probably not an innate tendency, but something that has been culturally acquired. Your reasons for adopting this habit have now been consciously suppressed or unconsciously repressed. Therefore, it is necessary to deal with this problem by getting back to some of the experiences and circumstances that lead to the habit. In order to do this I would suggest that you see a good psychiatrist who can assist you in bringing to the forefront of conscience all of those experiences and circumstances that lead to the habit. You are already on the right road toward a solution, since you honestly recognize the problem and have a desire to solve it.”
Interesting, but meaningless. He was very progressive for his time. It's a hypothetical what views he had had he continued to live and his views evolve with the times , and even more hypothetical what his views were had he been born to a different generation, but in either case there is no good reason to think they'd have stayed static.
The fact that he speaks of psychiatry (it was considered a form of mental illness at the time) rather than damnation indicates how progressive he was. Most people on the left in those days would have been disapproving of homosexuality.
That is a good point. I wonder what percent of Americans would have had a harsher reaction to such a letter. Easy to imagine him being in the top 10% of most liberal Americans at the time with regards to gay rights.
And given that he was a Black preacher from the South, that is really impressive
Agreed. We can hardly expect someone to have progressive views on homosexuality if they were never in their life exposed to such views. Being raised evangelical & conservative, it took me (1) working with several gays, (2) having a close relative come out as gay, (3) seeing lots of positive depictions of gays in media, etc. before my views changed.
MLK wasn’t Jesus and no one should expect anyone to be (lol). And in any case, we should measure Progressives by the progress they enable, not that against some impossible measure that they must solve every injustice inherited by the society they were born into and presumably helped propel forward in some way.
I’d say MLK gets some pretty high marks in that regard especially seeing as we’re all still typing about him here; still inspired by his words and legacy. (Same goes for our liberal founding fathers as progressives despite their institutionalized slavery and abject drunkenness, but different topic)
I remember hearing MLK’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech played for us kids in middle school (much like the one I send my kids currently) on a vinyl record, in honor of MLK day. Pure magic. The role of inspiration and leadership is sorely undervalued.
You could, but there aren't a lot of wealthy people. At some point, you have to tax the middle class. That's how they do it in Europe. If that's what you want, say so.
As for corporations, they merely collect taxes. Economists agree on this, but disagree on who pays how much. How do you determine what amount of corporate tax is paid by owners, employees, or customers? Figure that out and you'll get a Nobel Prize.
I think most people serious about a major expansion of the social safety net accept that there will have to be a tax increase for the middle class as well as the wealthy.
I think this demonstrates the challenge. Doing any of the first three would generate ENORMOUS push back and likely leads to a 2010/2018 wipe out for whichever party tries it.
By all means tax the middle class more, provided: 1. That the tax system overall is far more progressive (especially taxation on wealth) 2. That in return you get substantially increased government services, eg good public health insurance, low tuition high quality colleges, free or highly subsidized quality childcare and elderly care options, better public schools, better police, serious unemployment insurance etc.
that’s precisely what progressives have been arguing for all along !
FYI, our taxation is among the most progressive in the developed world already. How much more progressive do you want it to be? Again, the European countries pay for their safety nets with national sales taxes which most progressives oppose as being regressive.
I think this point deserves emphasis. Check the OECD site for data comparing the tax systems of modern countries. The US system is highly progressive--at or near the top because it lacks a substantial value added tax. The comparison looks at effective tax rates net of loopholes and exclusions. Tax the rich is more a campaign slogan than a realistic means of financing social insurance programs. Progressives need to understand that a progressive program can be financed with a proportional or regressive tax and still, be a progressive program net of everything.
I don’t think it’s very progressive when you take into account all the loopholes that disproportionately advantage the rich. I also note that the progressive form is a necessary but insufficient condition. It doesn’t actually tell you that amount being taxed. I agree it’s gonna have to go up for the middle class too. I have no problem with that provided the conditions above are met.
P.S.
To put it most bluntly, I think we would be better off as a whole if the middle class and especially the upper middle claaass and up have less money left for discretionary spending and fewer savings BUT far less need for savings as they have a much stronger social safety net, eg you don’t need to save for college, you need to save less for retirement, you are far less likely to incur any kind of suprise huge bills (eg medical), your bills are lower because anti trust is working properly(not a tax issue but part of the overall vision!)
THPacis, it sounds like you have something against people deciding by themselves what their priorities should be. Not everyone wants to part with their earnings for the bundle of benefits you want to give them. Your plan seems very top down and autocratic. In a word, anti-choice.
What "loopholes" would they be? They are often referenced, but seldom specified.
BTW, the Tax Cuts and Jobs act of 2017 closed an enormous one, the state and local income tax deduction, but progressives are up in arms about that even though it means the rich pay more in taxes. The other big ones are the mortgage interest deduction and charitable deductions. I haven't seen any calls for eliminating those although I would support that.
The reason we don't have value added tax here is not objections from progressives but conservative fears that it would raise too much money and be too reliable as a funding source for government.
I've always assumed that was, in fact, why conservatives were opposed to a value added tax. But I don't hear progressives advocating for one at all even though they admire the European social insurance programs financed by such a tax. I think both sides are somewhat stupid and stubborn. I would think a value added tax would be broadly acceptable if it were tied to financing health insurance, for example, or another popular use.
This may be true when focusing only on labor-income taxes. I would want to see drastically higher capital gain taxes and inheritance taxes (and in an ideal world, wealth taxes). The focus on wage-income & wage-taxes instead of wealth or investment-income is the most frustrating aspect of economic discourse.
If middle class people could expect all that from a higher personal tax rate, they may well be in favour of it. But I think people know that more tax would translate into more extravagantly paid administrators at universities, extortionate and poor quality public transport schemes, featherbedded and still useless cops, unemployable layabouts, and public schools that are still as bad as before.
Liberals can't just imagine a magic black box exists that turns 'taxpayers money' into 'better cops' and 'inexpensive, high quality colleges' etc.
That's the sad ethos of Reagan talking. The outcome you describe is one possibility, but a world class public university system, that is even free, not just low-tuition, has very few admins and teaching done overwhelmingly by tenured profs - is also possible. How do I know? Because the US had it in the past. I also know we can have good public schools because they exist already in many parts of the US, and on a national level we see many nations that are doing this successfully. The idea that governemnt can't accomplish anything is dangerously naive (and strangely evaporates in the minds of most conservatives claiming to believe it the second the armed forces are mentioned, or the idea we take their guns to defend themslevs against the potential tyranny of the hitherot totally incompetent government!)
Rather, government may or may not be well run, but the solution isn't anarchy, its making sure we have a good governemnt!
I'm extraordinarily skeptical that "a world class public university system, that is even free, not just low-tuition, has very few admins and teaching done overwhelmingly by tenured profs" would be possible today between the combination of increased demand and Baumol's cost disease.
Really? AFAICT someone who wants to e.g. eliminate 529 plans does not want to then make college free or cheaper for the kind of people who have 529 plans.
Depends what you mean by "wealth," which is very much a relative term once you get past the level of people who can't afford homeownership or investments.
Were they ever paid? The dirty little secret of the Reagan tax cuts is that they hardly changed the government tax take because there were so many loopholes that he closed at the same time.
Ever see the movie Glengarry Glen Ross and wonder why people were buying boiler room real estate at all? Using real estate losses to avoid paying those high tax rates was an industry.
It's amusing to note the the loophole ridden tax code has more often been legislated when Democrats have controlled one or both houses of Congress. We get what we vote for.
The Regan tax cuts reduced revenues. Federal income tax receipts fell between 1982 and 1983 even as the economy was growing and payroll tax receipts increased by 4%
I'm not so sure the economy was doing well. That <4% increase in payroll taxes looks to be less than a 1/3 of the normal increase in the years surrounding 1983. The income tax take also recovers between 1982-1985 after the 1983 dip with an annualized rate of increase of around 4% per year.
According to records compiled by the Tax Foundation, a single person making $16,000 in 1955 — that's $150,000 in today's dollars — had a marginal tax rate of 50%; compensation of $50,000 ($470,000 today) moved you into the 75% tax bracket; and an income of $200,000 ($1.9 million today) put you in the 91% tax bracket.
That's not how it works though. The 91% would only apply to a portion of your income, the last tranche. And anyone that was (or would be) subject to that can afford good lawyers to get their taxable income lower so that rate does not apply.
So then why not just lower the rate since no one is going to pay it anyway, as you say? Seems very inefficient to enact a high rate in the knowledge that it won't be paid anyway but will require wasting resources to make lawyers rich. What's the benefit in that?
And, Andy, that is how it works. Once my marginal tax rate is 91%, I'm getting to keep only 9 cents of every additional dollar I earn. For that pitiful return, why would I work anymore at all? I might prefer staying home and watching reruns of Judge Judy if I only get to keep 9 cents of every additional dollar I earn.
Still wouldn't collect enough to pay for all of Matt's or King's wish list. Federal taxation as a percentage of GDP has been fairly flat irrespective of rates. If it were so easy to do by taxing only the wealthy, why aren't the European countries doing that?
The parent comment is lazy. It relies upon the truth that many naive progressives have not thought through how to pay for their commitments, but turns a blind eye to the fact that there are a dozen functional social Democracies, all of which (with the possible exception of Norway) “pay for it” out of a smaller per capita resource base than the US has. It’s perfectly clear that we can “pay for it,” the question is finding the political will.
A subsidiary, but interesting, question is whether upper middle class people should want to pay for it. If you are in the top 5 or 10% any scheme of redistribution will hurt you in material terms. Is solidarity worth it? What psychological benefits are there?
I admired Canada before the pandemic, but the way they scrapped basic freedoms like association and travel and the fact that those restrictions were maintained long after seniors had access to vaccines really gives me pause. I don’t want to join a coalition for mandatory risk aversion
I don’t think there’s a concensus on what “Kingism” means. Matt’s article is, to my knowledge, historically and analytically accurate, but King has basically turned into a totem different people invoke for different agendas.
Since King never held executive office, he never had to make policy choices or reconcile conflicting ideals. He got to go around saying nice things and motivating protests
I think it’s uncharitably unfair and intellectually lazy to say that conservatives *don’t want* to eliminate slums, have full employment, and have an excellent education system for all. Maybe there are some fringe nut jobs who don’t want those things, but the vast majority of conservatives would hear King’s words and cheer. What they disagree about is *how to get there,* and to a lesser extent, about what is possible in the real world.
Liberals sometimes think they can legislate reality away. The chief example is housing, where we have an intense housing shortage caused by a history of regulating development ever more strictly so that only “good” development can happen. No density, no boarding houses, etc etc. because from a certain person’s aesthetic those kinds of housing are just abhorrent and “nobody should live like that.” But if we ban all cheap forms of housing then we won’t have any cheap housing and many people end up unhoused entirely, which is far, far worse. Hence we have MY campaigning for a very conservative solution: less regulation and a pursuit of housing abundance.
In my experience most conservatives take unintended consequences of policy very seriously, while most progressives focus on “intent” and ideological purity while being quite hand-wavy about actual outcomes.
(Note that I am NOT defending the current crop of do-nothing / reactionary / populist / chaos muppets that have taken over the Republican Party. They aren’t conservatives anyway.)
Yeah, but there's a meaningful difference between "I'd be happy with x if someone were to wave a magic wand and magically make x happen" and "I'm willing to work hard and sacrifice something for the sake of achieving x."
Outside of the most lefty progressives, I don't think anyone envisions conservatives cackling evilly at the sight of poor, uneducated, unemployed people. Conservatives are accused of not wanting to *do anything* to help people in need, or more specifically, of not supporting government action to help people in need.
Marie Antoinette did not say "I enjoy watching poor peasants suffer;" she said "Let them eat cake." That does not make her praiseworthy. (Yes, I know the "Let them eat cake" quote is apocryphal, but I'm using it to illustrate a point.)
I think conservatives are taking the bait from intentional 'throw-poop-against-the-fan' by progressives via a relentless onslaught of bad faith investigations and policy hobbling the opposition with bitterness and vengeance. For instance, there's no way most progressives believe men can just call themselves women and need drag shows for kindergarteners. This is using the mentally ill to distract the public and correct-thinking law makers from bigger moves.
For instance, nobody gives a crap if Steve Buscemi wants to put lipstick on his face and tuck his junk looking into his bedroom mirror. But if he wants to prance around with a fishnet bulge for strange 5 year olds, you get arrested. Simple. I can't take my son to a pasty-wearing strip club. Steve Buscemi dressed up like red light Little Mermaid can't drag show his balls off for him either. That's logical. So now, we gotta clean this mess up instead of focus on what really matters. This is why I can't help but think many progressives just want everything to burn. What's the end game? Seriously. I'd love to know. Millions would. I wonder how many good faith progressives would stay on board if they knew the real agenda is to flood the country with economic refugees, wreck the dollar, cause a resource and institution crisis and make gov't the savior in order to gain near total control. Most are gonna be on the wrong end of that. Quality of life for almost of all of us will be reduced and some won't have life.
Regarding, Hunter Biden, the hypocrisy is what it is. Sure, we should all want an investigation into the laptop but not because we care about Hunter Biden's crack addiction. I want to know what it'll uncover that actually matters and what leverage can be derived in order to make real progressive change for climate, energy, housing, responsible family planning (incentivize smaller families), and practical personal freedoms, not policies causing institutional rot, lawlessness, child sexualization, a crippled economy, no societal standards, and all victimhood. We need to create better people, not self-described activists on puberty blockers.
And how is DEI a major now?!? Do we need more people with a large bill and no skill? (Well, yes, if you're goal is to make everyone a modern serf.) Anyone blindly sending their kid to college is as braindead as the rot the humanities churns out. "Let's take on a mortgage so lil Dickey can call math racist." SIGN ME UP! Poor Lil Dickey will emerge blaming the capitalism boogeyman and run to the mighty gov't to be saved.
I assume the drag queen story hour is new. (Worse are the actual Family Drag Shows. I mean, the point of the shows was always sex-ed up perversion. Fine. For adults. Family Drag Shows have to be a red herring.) Like many things these days it seemed become popular shortly after the COVID re-opening. There's probably an example before 2020, but they're everywhere these days and have been recently popping up in public libraries. Let me know when Tawny Kitaen is grindin' on a white Jaguar and I'll send my kids down. ... I kid because I care. Just makin' a point that it's perverted illogical insanity.
Yes, as Matt says, it’s ok to agree with historical figures on some things but not others - even, I would add, within the same speech. MLK was a great moral leader but not an economist. One can share the moral goal of alleviating poverty while sincerely and sharply disagreeing on the means to achieve that goal.
I do think that conservatives of that era made some fundamental mistakes. They were so afraid of The Left exploiting the condition of Black Americans but failed to see that the best way to avoid that would be to make sure that Blacks could fully participate in capitalism. Rather than engaging the Civil Rights movement and encouraging it to be a force for opportunity, not entitlement, the conservative movement allowed the party that freed the slaves to be seen as the party that was, at best, indifferent to the concerns of Black Americans.
There was a not unreasonable fear that enfranchising a bunch of poor people would swing politics to the left, although Gladstone and late Victorian liberals experienced the opposite after the Third Reform Act: working class Tories who wanted to keep the Union Jack flying over Dublin and Dakkah, who resented middle class liberals for wanting to tax beer and limit pub hours.
As opposed to the right-wing economic agenda of refusing to raise the minimum wage or expand Medicaid? Just my two cents but I don't think that agenda has much to offer anyone besides CEOs and multimillionaires who want tax cuts.
As I said, we can sincerely disagree on economic policy. Since you asked, the centerpiece of my own agenda would be to replace all current taxes with a Land Value Tax that would address unearned inequality without punishing work and investment.
The fear that poor people will use their votes to redistribute things rich people have is what motivated restrictions on the franchise since the 18th century. It’s very difficult to wall off egalitarian politics from political equality. Working class Toryism (in its British and Reganite forms) is the most successful effort to do this, and it never succeeded in cutting existing entitlements or keeping those with more progressive economic policies out of power for long
Love the reposting of old gems I may have missed. I often find myself sitting down on Sunday mornings with a pot of coffee thinking that I wish I had a Slow Boring piece to read. Maybe on one or two of the weekend days it would be cool to send out old articles that are still relevant or worth a read like you did today? This would give subscribers something to read over the weekend, shine a spotlight on interesting things they may have missed, and (I assume) wouldn't require much work on Slow Boring's end. Thanks for all the interesting content!
There are only a dozen holidays a year, so reposting old gems is perfect for holidays. But there are 52 Sundays a year. On Sundays he could post concurrences and dissents from readers.
"[Rustin's] basic vision — improved public services, an enhanced welfare state, a robust commitment to full employment — is exactly what I think a sound political vision looks like."
improved public services - yes!
an enhanced welfare state - yes, with some attention paid to where you're starting to create perverse incentives (see below).
a robust commitment to full employment - hmmm... I'm unconvinced.
I once read a book where the author (possibly Tom Friedman, but I can't remember for sure) was visiting a poor Asian country and saw a bunch of men squatting on a lawn, trimming the grass with sickles. His host explained to him that to maintain stability, the government had to strive for full employment above all. From the local government official's perspective, it was much better to hire ten men to cut the grass with sickles for a pittance than to hire one man with a lawnmower and have nine unemployed men sitting around.
Is this what we want for America? Crappy make-work to achieve full employment?
And if the answer is "why no, we want high quality, well-paying jobs for all," the questions immediately become "who is going to pay for all these jobs?" and "what about people who are not qualified for them?"
Also, notice that a robust safety net and full employment trade off against each other, to a certain extent. The better the unemployment benefits, the more people will make the logical choice to subsist off benefits rather than work. Disability benefits can hypothetically range from "horribly stingy and cruel, disabled people must force themselves to work or else starve" to "so lenient that many able-bodied but lazy people can successfully fake being disabled and live off the benefits without having to work."
I don’t think that’s what Matt means by full employment at all. He means, from a Fed policy perspective, don’t heavily prioritize the goal to keep inflation low at the cost of the dual mandate to maximize employment, a poor balance of priorities which led to the painfully slow recovery of the 2010s.
OK, that's very different, and much more sensible. I may have misunderstood Matt's original comment.
Based on the whole thrust of the article, though, and MLK's references to the Biblical command to care for the poor, I'm not sure your interpretation fits. Jesus in the Bible was much more into "come, rich man, sell all you own and give to the poor" and not "the government should have a pro-employment fiscal policy."
Matt Y., if you're reading this - which interpretation is correct?
Thanks for reposting this. Really enjoyed rereading this. Two things.
(1) Your grand-dad was a wonderful writer with a rich legacy. As someone who grew up in Tampa and went to school in Ybor City at OLPH, I came to love the area and it's history. You've probably seen this article, but just in case:
Typo, it’s canon, not cannon. I wouldn’t have bothered posting, but the “cannon of national heroes” sounds like an amazing circus attraction, way better than Disney’s hall of presidents.
King’s economic radicalism becomes even clearer if you look at the 1964 income tax brackets. The top rate was 70%. Those with incomes of $20k ($193k today) paid a marginal rate of 32%. At $40k ($386k today) the rate was 48%. Only $60k ($595k today) was exempted from the estate tax.
King was saying that, a country with a more progressive tax system than any big European country has today, woefully underserved the poor.
Of course, the safety net in 1964 was pretty thin. Defense spending was 8% of GDP, more than twice the present figure. Higher taxes basically went for tanks and missiles to keep the communists at bay, which is why sensible chamber of commerce types were willing to pay them.
I don't think those rates were really ever paid, there were so many loopholes to avoid paying tax. Government tax revenue as a percentage of GDP has been quite stable - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S -
I think this is a progressive myth of a bygone era where people were happily paying more taxes.
And it was less than 15.5% in 1959, 16% in 1965 and 16.5% and again in the early 1970s when they were supposedly paying these high tax rates. I'm just not seeing a consistent difference.
I tend to agree however the DEI fight is a modern incarnation of the same struggle. Perhaps not a perfect incarnation worthy of King’s legacy but at least an earnest attempt to move the ball forward.
I find it all too fitting we see portions of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, ones you specifically refer to here regarding police brutality, edited out of today. They demonstrate too plainly the same forces thrive today as they did 60 years ago
I think it would be better to focus on expanding Medicaid in holdout states and raising the minimum wage rather than making sure there are enough minorities on the board of Amazon.
Wouldn't raising the minimum wage make it more difficult for those with no skills or experience to get jobs? Minimum wage laws don't require businesses to hire people whose skills don't enable them to produce more than they cost. My first job was (legally) less than the federal minimum wage. I didn't hurt me and it did teach me skills. And, as I was living at home, I had no need of a "living wage".
To add one more banal observation on top of another (as per a recent WaPo article I read), the extent to which both sides of the standard political spectrum feel the need to cling to parts of MLK's ideas just displays the strength of national civic religion - and I see it as a win for civility in general.
To the extent someone may disagree with King - be it his views on class solidarity in favor of a kind of racial maximalism akin to standard woke movements, or his views of material redistribution and egalitarianism - the fact that the disagreement centers King, and that the side seen as more exemplifying his message is correct, is a win for progress.
Per you point yesterday there was an NYT article on how MLK was woke and a WSJ article on how he would have opposed intersectionality. It was amusing.
The WSJ piece is far more reasonable, if only because MLK was a man of his time. His views on homosexuality, for example, would today be almost as far from “woke” as could be imagined. In a letter to a young man asking for advice on his homosexuality, King responded,
“Your problem is not at all an uncommon one. However, it does require careful attention. The type of feeling that you have toward boys is probably not an innate tendency, but something that has been culturally acquired. Your reasons for adopting this habit have now been consciously suppressed or unconsciously repressed. Therefore, it is necessary to deal with this problem by getting back to some of the experiences and circumstances that lead to the habit. In order to do this I would suggest that you see a good psychiatrist who can assist you in bringing to the forefront of conscience all of those experiences and circumstances that lead to the habit. You are already on the right road toward a solution, since you honestly recognize the problem and have a desire to solve it.”
Interesting, but meaningless. He was very progressive for his time. It's a hypothetical what views he had had he continued to live and his views evolve with the times , and even more hypothetical what his views were had he been born to a different generation, but in either case there is no good reason to think they'd have stayed static.
"He was very progressive for his time"
Indeed, and he'd probably be one today were he alive. I don't think he woulr be "woke," however, because that's become a sickness.
I would like to believe you're correct on both counts.
The fact that he speaks of psychiatry (it was considered a form of mental illness at the time) rather than damnation indicates how progressive he was. Most people on the left in those days would have been disapproving of homosexuality.
He does clearly disapprove, but he is compassionate.
That is a good point. I wonder what percent of Americans would have had a harsher reaction to such a letter. Easy to imagine him being in the top 10% of most liberal Americans at the time with regards to gay rights.
And given that he was a Black preacher from the South, that is really impressive
Agreed. We can hardly expect someone to have progressive views on homosexuality if they were never in their life exposed to such views. Being raised evangelical & conservative, it took me (1) working with several gays, (2) having a close relative come out as gay, (3) seeing lots of positive depictions of gays in media, etc. before my views changed.
Wow. This isn’t exactly surprising (he was a preacher after all, and in the 60s), but I’ve never seen it before.
Excellent point.
MLK wasn’t Jesus and no one should expect anyone to be (lol). And in any case, we should measure Progressives by the progress they enable, not that against some impossible measure that they must solve every injustice inherited by the society they were born into and presumably helped propel forward in some way.
I’d say MLK gets some pretty high marks in that regard especially seeing as we’re all still typing about him here; still inspired by his words and legacy. (Same goes for our liberal founding fathers as progressives despite their institutionalized slavery and abject drunkenness, but different topic)
I remember hearing MLK’s ‘I Have A Dream’ speech played for us kids in middle school (much like the one I send my kids currently) on a vinyl record, in honor of MLK day. Pure magic. The role of inspiration and leadership is sorely undervalued.
Who is going to pay for "massive material redistribution"? Are there any downsides?
I so wish that progressives would address these and not simply assume them away.
It's not going to happen, so nobody has to care about implementation issues.
How about going back to 1950s tax rates on the wealthy and corporations?
You could, but there aren't a lot of wealthy people. At some point, you have to tax the middle class. That's how they do it in Europe. If that's what you want, say so.
As for corporations, they merely collect taxes. Economists agree on this, but disagree on who pays how much. How do you determine what amount of corporate tax is paid by owners, employees, or customers? Figure that out and you'll get a Nobel Prize.
I think most people serious about a major expansion of the social safety net accept that there will have to be a tax increase for the middle class as well as the wealthy.
Perhaps they do, but they are fastidious about not saying that.
I think this demonstrates the challenge. Doing any of the first three would generate ENORMOUS push back and likely leads to a 2010/2018 wipe out for whichever party tries it.
Also retirement plans, don't forget those
By all means tax the middle class more, provided: 1. That the tax system overall is far more progressive (especially taxation on wealth) 2. That in return you get substantially increased government services, eg good public health insurance, low tuition high quality colleges, free or highly subsidized quality childcare and elderly care options, better public schools, better police, serious unemployment insurance etc.
that’s precisely what progressives have been arguing for all along !
FYI, our taxation is among the most progressive in the developed world already. How much more progressive do you want it to be? Again, the European countries pay for their safety nets with national sales taxes which most progressives oppose as being regressive.
I think this point deserves emphasis. Check the OECD site for data comparing the tax systems of modern countries. The US system is highly progressive--at or near the top because it lacks a substantial value added tax. The comparison looks at effective tax rates net of loopholes and exclusions. Tax the rich is more a campaign slogan than a realistic means of financing social insurance programs. Progressives need to understand that a progressive program can be financed with a proportional or regressive tax and still, be a progressive program net of everything.
I don’t think it’s very progressive when you take into account all the loopholes that disproportionately advantage the rich. I also note that the progressive form is a necessary but insufficient condition. It doesn’t actually tell you that amount being taxed. I agree it’s gonna have to go up for the middle class too. I have no problem with that provided the conditions above are met.
P.S.
To put it most bluntly, I think we would be better off as a whole if the middle class and especially the upper middle claaass and up have less money left for discretionary spending and fewer savings BUT far less need for savings as they have a much stronger social safety net, eg you don’t need to save for college, you need to save less for retirement, you are far less likely to incur any kind of suprise huge bills (eg medical), your bills are lower because anti trust is working properly(not a tax issue but part of the overall vision!)
THPacis, it sounds like you have something against people deciding by themselves what their priorities should be. Not everyone wants to part with their earnings for the bundle of benefits you want to give them. Your plan seems very top down and autocratic. In a word, anti-choice.
What "loopholes" would they be? They are often referenced, but seldom specified.
BTW, the Tax Cuts and Jobs act of 2017 closed an enormous one, the state and local income tax deduction, but progressives are up in arms about that even though it means the rich pay more in taxes. The other big ones are the mortgage interest deduction and charitable deductions. I haven't seen any calls for eliminating those although I would support that.
The reason we don't have value added tax here is not objections from progressives but conservative fears that it would raise too much money and be too reliable as a funding source for government.
I've always assumed that was, in fact, why conservatives were opposed to a value added tax. But I don't hear progressives advocating for one at all even though they admire the European social insurance programs financed by such a tax. I think both sides are somewhat stupid and stubborn. I would think a value added tax would be broadly acceptable if it were tied to financing health insurance, for example, or another popular use.
This may be true when focusing only on labor-income taxes. I would want to see drastically higher capital gain taxes and inheritance taxes (and in an ideal world, wealth taxes). The focus on wage-income & wage-taxes instead of wealth or investment-income is the most frustrating aspect of economic discourse.
“…drastically higher capital gain taxes…”
How drastic? And how would that affect investment and therefore economic growth?
If middle class people could expect all that from a higher personal tax rate, they may well be in favour of it. But I think people know that more tax would translate into more extravagantly paid administrators at universities, extortionate and poor quality public transport schemes, featherbedded and still useless cops, unemployable layabouts, and public schools that are still as bad as before.
Liberals can't just imagine a magic black box exists that turns 'taxpayers money' into 'better cops' and 'inexpensive, high quality colleges' etc.
That's the sad ethos of Reagan talking. The outcome you describe is one possibility, but a world class public university system, that is even free, not just low-tuition, has very few admins and teaching done overwhelmingly by tenured profs - is also possible. How do I know? Because the US had it in the past. I also know we can have good public schools because they exist already in many parts of the US, and on a national level we see many nations that are doing this successfully. The idea that governemnt can't accomplish anything is dangerously naive (and strangely evaporates in the minds of most conservatives claiming to believe it the second the armed forces are mentioned, or the idea we take their guns to defend themslevs against the potential tyranny of the hitherot totally incompetent government!)
Rather, government may or may not be well run, but the solution isn't anarchy, its making sure we have a good governemnt!
I'm extraordinarily skeptical that "a world class public university system, that is even free, not just low-tuition, has very few admins and teaching done overwhelmingly by tenured profs" would be possible today between the combination of increased demand and Baumol's cost disease.
The US's tax system as a whole is more progressive than most of Europe's, based on which income deciles pay.
Really? AFAICT someone who wants to e.g. eliminate 529 plans does not want to then make college free or cheaper for the kind of people who have 529 plans.
Depends what you mean by "wealth," which is very much a relative term once you get past the level of people who can't afford homeownership or investments.
Were they ever paid? The dirty little secret of the Reagan tax cuts is that they hardly changed the government tax take because there were so many loopholes that he closed at the same time.
Ever see the movie Glengarry Glen Ross and wonder why people were buying boiler room real estate at all? Using real estate losses to avoid paying those high tax rates was an industry.
It's amusing to note the the loophole ridden tax code has more often been legislated when Democrats have controlled one or both houses of Congress. We get what we vote for.
The Regan tax cuts reduced revenues. Federal income tax receipts fell between 1982 and 1983 even as the economy was growing and payroll tax receipts increased by 4%
I'm not so sure the economy was doing well. That <4% increase in payroll taxes looks to be less than a 1/3 of the normal increase in the years surrounding 1983. The income tax take also recovers between 1982-1985 after the 1983 dip with an annualized rate of increase of around 4% per year.
https://taxfoundation.org/federal-tax-revenue-source-1934-2018/
How about eliminating corporate taxes altogether instead?
Good idea, but politicians like it too much because it hides who is really paying the taxes.
Just for reference...
According to records compiled by the Tax Foundation, a single person making $16,000 in 1955 — that's $150,000 in today's dollars — had a marginal tax rate of 50%; compensation of $50,000 ($470,000 today) moved you into the 75% tax bracket; and an income of $200,000 ($1.9 million today) put you in the 91% tax bracket.
Marginal rates are not effective rates.
No, but marginal rates affect behavior. If my marginal rate is 91%, it will be a powerful disincentive for me to work.
That's not how it works though. The 91% would only apply to a portion of your income, the last tranche. And anyone that was (or would be) subject to that can afford good lawyers to get their taxable income lower so that rate does not apply.
So then why not just lower the rate since no one is going to pay it anyway, as you say? Seems very inefficient to enact a high rate in the knowledge that it won't be paid anyway but will require wasting resources to make lawyers rich. What's the benefit in that?
And, Andy, that is how it works. Once my marginal tax rate is 91%, I'm getting to keep only 9 cents of every additional dollar I earn. For that pitiful return, why would I work anymore at all? I might prefer staying home and watching reruns of Judge Judy if I only get to keep 9 cents of every additional dollar I earn.
The real tax rates were pretty close to what they are now, despite the cast difference in nominal tax rates.
All it did was shift how people were compensated to avoid taxation.
And cause all sorts of distortions and problems as a side effect.
You have to go back to those rates and while not fighting the cold war.
Still wouldn't collect enough to pay for all of Matt's or King's wish list. Federal taxation as a percentage of GDP has been fairly flat irrespective of rates. If it were so easy to do by taxing only the wealthy, why aren't the European countries doing that?
The 1964 tax code hit all classes pretty hard. I linked to the brackets on my comment, the first penny of income was taxed at 14%
First penny of taxable income. Taxable income and income often diverge.
The parent comment is lazy. It relies upon the truth that many naive progressives have not thought through how to pay for their commitments, but turns a blind eye to the fact that there are a dozen functional social Democracies, all of which (with the possible exception of Norway) “pay for it” out of a smaller per capita resource base than the US has. It’s perfectly clear that we can “pay for it,” the question is finding the political will.
A subsidiary, but interesting, question is whether upper middle class people should want to pay for it. If you are in the top 5 or 10% any scheme of redistribution will hurt you in material terms. Is solidarity worth it? What psychological benefits are there?
I admired Canada before the pandemic, but the way they scrapped basic freedoms like association and travel and the fact that those restrictions were maintained long after seniors had access to vaccines really gives me pause. I don’t want to join a coalition for mandatory risk aversion
I don’t think there’s a concensus on what “Kingism” means. Matt’s article is, to my knowledge, historically and analytically accurate, but King has basically turned into a totem different people invoke for different agendas.
Since King never held executive office, he never had to make policy choices or reconcile conflicting ideals. He got to go around saying nice things and motivating protests
I think it’s uncharitably unfair and intellectually lazy to say that conservatives *don’t want* to eliminate slums, have full employment, and have an excellent education system for all. Maybe there are some fringe nut jobs who don’t want those things, but the vast majority of conservatives would hear King’s words and cheer. What they disagree about is *how to get there,* and to a lesser extent, about what is possible in the real world.
Liberals sometimes think they can legislate reality away. The chief example is housing, where we have an intense housing shortage caused by a history of regulating development ever more strictly so that only “good” development can happen. No density, no boarding houses, etc etc. because from a certain person’s aesthetic those kinds of housing are just abhorrent and “nobody should live like that.” But if we ban all cheap forms of housing then we won’t have any cheap housing and many people end up unhoused entirely, which is far, far worse. Hence we have MY campaigning for a very conservative solution: less regulation and a pursuit of housing abundance.
In my experience most conservatives take unintended consequences of policy very seriously, while most progressives focus on “intent” and ideological purity while being quite hand-wavy about actual outcomes.
(Note that I am NOT defending the current crop of do-nothing / reactionary / populist / chaos muppets that have taken over the Republican Party. They aren’t conservatives anyway.)
What was the first item on Republican Party’s legislative agenda the last time it won a trifecta in Washington?
Yeah, but there's a meaningful difference between "I'd be happy with x if someone were to wave a magic wand and magically make x happen" and "I'm willing to work hard and sacrifice something for the sake of achieving x."
Outside of the most lefty progressives, I don't think anyone envisions conservatives cackling evilly at the sight of poor, uneducated, unemployed people. Conservatives are accused of not wanting to *do anything* to help people in need, or more specifically, of not supporting government action to help people in need.
Marie Antoinette did not say "I enjoy watching poor peasants suffer;" she said "Let them eat cake." That does not make her praiseworthy. (Yes, I know the "Let them eat cake" quote is apocryphal, but I'm using it to illustrate a point.)
I think conservatives are taking the bait from intentional 'throw-poop-against-the-fan' by progressives via a relentless onslaught of bad faith investigations and policy hobbling the opposition with bitterness and vengeance. For instance, there's no way most progressives believe men can just call themselves women and need drag shows for kindergarteners. This is using the mentally ill to distract the public and correct-thinking law makers from bigger moves.
For instance, nobody gives a crap if Steve Buscemi wants to put lipstick on his face and tuck his junk looking into his bedroom mirror. But if he wants to prance around with a fishnet bulge for strange 5 year olds, you get arrested. Simple. I can't take my son to a pasty-wearing strip club. Steve Buscemi dressed up like red light Little Mermaid can't drag show his balls off for him either. That's logical. So now, we gotta clean this mess up instead of focus on what really matters. This is why I can't help but think many progressives just want everything to burn. What's the end game? Seriously. I'd love to know. Millions would. I wonder how many good faith progressives would stay on board if they knew the real agenda is to flood the country with economic refugees, wreck the dollar, cause a resource and institution crisis and make gov't the savior in order to gain near total control. Most are gonna be on the wrong end of that. Quality of life for almost of all of us will be reduced and some won't have life.
Regarding, Hunter Biden, the hypocrisy is what it is. Sure, we should all want an investigation into the laptop but not because we care about Hunter Biden's crack addiction. I want to know what it'll uncover that actually matters and what leverage can be derived in order to make real progressive change for climate, energy, housing, responsible family planning (incentivize smaller families), and practical personal freedoms, not policies causing institutional rot, lawlessness, child sexualization, a crippled economy, no societal standards, and all victimhood. We need to create better people, not self-described activists on puberty blockers.
And how is DEI a major now?!? Do we need more people with a large bill and no skill? (Well, yes, if you're goal is to make everyone a modern serf.) Anyone blindly sending their kid to college is as braindead as the rot the humanities churns out. "Let's take on a mortgage so lil Dickey can call math racist." SIGN ME UP! Poor Lil Dickey will emerge blaming the capitalism boogeyman and run to the mighty gov't to be saved.
I assume the drag queen story hour is new. (Worse are the actual Family Drag Shows. I mean, the point of the shows was always sex-ed up perversion. Fine. For adults. Family Drag Shows have to be a red herring.) Like many things these days it seemed become popular shortly after the COVID re-opening. There's probably an example before 2020, but they're everywhere these days and have been recently popping up in public libraries. Let me know when Tawny Kitaen is grindin' on a white Jaguar and I'll send my kids down. ... I kid because I care. Just makin' a point that it's perverted illogical insanity.
RIP TK
Yes, as Matt says, it’s ok to agree with historical figures on some things but not others - even, I would add, within the same speech. MLK was a great moral leader but not an economist. One can share the moral goal of alleviating poverty while sincerely and sharply disagreeing on the means to achieve that goal.
I do think that conservatives of that era made some fundamental mistakes. They were so afraid of The Left exploiting the condition of Black Americans but failed to see that the best way to avoid that would be to make sure that Blacks could fully participate in capitalism. Rather than engaging the Civil Rights movement and encouraging it to be a force for opportunity, not entitlement, the conservative movement allowed the party that freed the slaves to be seen as the party that was, at best, indifferent to the concerns of Black Americans.
"Exploiting the condition of Black Americans" by passing civil rights and voting rights legislation. Right.
There was a not unreasonable fear that enfranchising a bunch of poor people would swing politics to the left, although Gladstone and late Victorian liberals experienced the opposite after the Third Reform Act: working class Tories who wanted to keep the Union Jack flying over Dublin and Dakkah, who resented middle class liberals for wanting to tax beer and limit pub hours.
As I was hoping was clear from the context, I was referring to a leftist economic agenda.
As opposed to the right-wing economic agenda of refusing to raise the minimum wage or expand Medicaid? Just my two cents but I don't think that agenda has much to offer anyone besides CEOs and multimillionaires who want tax cuts.
As I said, we can sincerely disagree on economic policy. Since you asked, the centerpiece of my own agenda would be to replace all current taxes with a Land Value Tax that would address unearned inequality without punishing work and investment.
"replace all current taxes"
I strongly dislike the idea of a "single tax to rule them all" approach as I suspect almost all taxes have terrible trade offs if taken to an extreme.
The fear that poor people will use their votes to redistribute things rich people have is what motivated restrictions on the franchise since the 18th century. It’s very difficult to wall off egalitarian politics from political equality. Working class Toryism (in its British and Reganite forms) is the most successful effort to do this, and it never succeeded in cutting existing entitlements or keeping those with more progressive economic policies out of power for long
Love the reposting of old gems I may have missed. I often find myself sitting down on Sunday mornings with a pot of coffee thinking that I wish I had a Slow Boring piece to read. Maybe on one or two of the weekend days it would be cool to send out old articles that are still relevant or worth a read like you did today? This would give subscribers something to read over the weekend, shine a spotlight on interesting things they may have missed, and (I assume) wouldn't require much work on Slow Boring's end. Thanks for all the interesting content!
Yes! I always find it a little frustrating that the days I have the most time to engage there’s the least content to engage with.
There are only a dozen holidays a year, so reposting old gems is perfect for holidays. But there are 52 Sundays a year. On Sundays he could post concurrences and dissents from readers.
An airing of grievances, you say?
How do we showcase feats of strength virtually?
Feats of rhetorical strength
No, it should be puns.
Be careful what you wish for.
Or just shift the schedule? Matt isn’t responding to the daily news cycle so could just shift posts by a day (eg MWThFSa).
"[Rustin's] basic vision — improved public services, an enhanced welfare state, a robust commitment to full employment — is exactly what I think a sound political vision looks like."
improved public services - yes!
an enhanced welfare state - yes, with some attention paid to where you're starting to create perverse incentives (see below).
a robust commitment to full employment - hmmm... I'm unconvinced.
I once read a book where the author (possibly Tom Friedman, but I can't remember for sure) was visiting a poor Asian country and saw a bunch of men squatting on a lawn, trimming the grass with sickles. His host explained to him that to maintain stability, the government had to strive for full employment above all. From the local government official's perspective, it was much better to hire ten men to cut the grass with sickles for a pittance than to hire one man with a lawnmower and have nine unemployed men sitting around.
Is this what we want for America? Crappy make-work to achieve full employment?
And if the answer is "why no, we want high quality, well-paying jobs for all," the questions immediately become "who is going to pay for all these jobs?" and "what about people who are not qualified for them?"
Also, notice that a robust safety net and full employment trade off against each other, to a certain extent. The better the unemployment benefits, the more people will make the logical choice to subsist off benefits rather than work. Disability benefits can hypothetically range from "horribly stingy and cruel, disabled people must force themselves to work or else starve" to "so lenient that many able-bodied but lazy people can successfully fake being disabled and live off the benefits without having to work."
I don’t think that’s what Matt means by full employment at all. He means, from a Fed policy perspective, don’t heavily prioritize the goal to keep inflation low at the cost of the dual mandate to maximize employment, a poor balance of priorities which led to the painfully slow recovery of the 2010s.
OK, that's very different, and much more sensible. I may have misunderstood Matt's original comment.
Based on the whole thrust of the article, though, and MLK's references to the Biblical command to care for the poor, I'm not sure your interpretation fits. Jesus in the Bible was much more into "come, rich man, sell all you own and give to the poor" and not "the government should have a pro-employment fiscal policy."
Matt Y., if you're reading this - which interpretation is correct?
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/underrating-full-employment
"The cannon of national heros"
4th of july just keeps getting more exciting
Someone who knows animation please make this a reality. It would be amazing.
Oh, man, I missed that one! Awesome!
Ugh, public posts really bring out the conservative trolls, don’t they?
Just a reminder, only paid subscribers can comment (free subscribers can like comments though).
I think the likes must skew conservative tho and since the default setting is Top First it seems to change the tone / direction of the discussion.
Like this one has a weird comment / like distribution:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/happy-new-year-republicans-have-changed/comments
We need Matt Hagy to run sentiment analysis on comments sorted by likes for open vs. closed posts!
Oh, yeah I guess so. Today just seems extra crabby, no?
Maybe just more concentrated than usual. I think a lot of people only comment if they are at work. 😉
Thanks for reposting this. Really enjoyed rereading this. Two things.
(1) Your grand-dad was a wonderful writer with a rich legacy. As someone who grew up in Tampa and went to school in Ybor City at OLPH, I came to love the area and it's history. You've probably seen this article, but just in case:
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1396&context=tampabayhistory
(2) On the subject of wealth (not income) inequality, Sandy Darity at Duke is doing great work. Here are links to a couple of his papers.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/00027162211028822
https://socialequity.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/DarityAddoSmithCEP2020.pdf
Typo, it’s canon, not cannon. I wouldn’t have bothered posting, but the “cannon of national heroes” sounds like an amazing circus attraction, way better than Disney’s hall of presidents.
King’s economic radicalism becomes even clearer if you look at the 1964 income tax brackets. The top rate was 70%. Those with incomes of $20k ($193k today) paid a marginal rate of 32%. At $40k ($386k today) the rate was 48%. Only $60k ($595k today) was exempted from the estate tax.
King was saying that, a country with a more progressive tax system than any big European country has today, woefully underserved the poor.
Of course, the safety net in 1964 was pretty thin. Defense spending was 8% of GDP, more than twice the present figure. Higher taxes basically went for tanks and missiles to keep the communists at bay, which is why sensible chamber of commerce types were willing to pay them.
https://www.tax-brackets.org/federaltaxtable/1964
I don't think those rates were really ever paid, there were so many loopholes to avoid paying tax. Government tax revenue as a percentage of GDP has been quite stable - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S -
I think this is a progressive myth of a bygone era where people were happily paying more taxes.
it declined from 18.5 to 16.5 percent immediately after the reagan tax cuts
And it was less than 15.5% in 1959, 16% in 1965 and 16.5% and again in the early 1970s when they were supposedly paying these high tax rates. I'm just not seeing a consistent difference.
Marginal rates are very different from effective rates.
Great piece.
I tend to agree however the DEI fight is a modern incarnation of the same struggle. Perhaps not a perfect incarnation worthy of King’s legacy but at least an earnest attempt to move the ball forward.
I find it all too fitting we see portions of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, ones you specifically refer to here regarding police brutality, edited out of today. They demonstrate too plainly the same forces thrive today as they did 60 years ago
https://mobile.twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/1614742904521596928?cxt=HHwWgIC9ubmH3OgsAAAA
I think it would be better to focus on expanding Medicaid in holdout states and raising the minimum wage rather than making sure there are enough minorities on the board of Amazon.
Wouldn't raising the minimum wage make it more difficult for those with no skills or experience to get jobs? Minimum wage laws don't require businesses to hire people whose skills don't enable them to produce more than they cost. My first job was (legally) less than the federal minimum wage. I didn't hurt me and it did teach me skills. And, as I was living at home, I had no need of a "living wage".