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2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

In the context of American history, we have severely failed at this point. One only needs to look at the 2017 tax bill passed by the Republican controlled Congress to see that the fight for this is not over. A point often taught to most is that of the Optimal Tax theory, where taxes rates should exist in a "Goldilocks" zone, where they collect just enough taxes to not harm economic output. But does that really make sense in Late-Stage Capitalism, where consolidation and concentration are the key drivers of wealth "creation"?

In the 2017 tax bill, the top income tax rate was reduced from 39.6% to 37%, it doesn't seem like much, but looking at the bigger picture, it's clearly a step in the wrong direction. Economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Stefanie Stantcheva came to the conclusion in their paper "Optimal Taxation of Top Labor Incomes: A Tale of Three Elasticities" (2011) that the optimal top tax income rate should be 83%! Why then do we have such a gap? If we're looking at America specifically, it's because the government has been captured by private industries for their own benefit. Piketty et al note in their paper that as governments around the world have reduced their tax rates since 1975, the wealth of the top 1% has increased dramatically. They in turn, have poured billions into elections and media propaganda to propagate a myth that we all need lower taxes. 

Take for example the 83% figure. You found it shocking, no? To the average person, you'd be hard pressed to not find someone flabbergasted by the notion of the government taking 83% of your income. Unfortunately, the top earners in this economy have convinced us that a high tax rate affects us all equally. But let's take a quick look at tax rates vs effective tax rates. For simplicity's sake, I'm using SmartAsset.com's income tax calculator. Let's assume you're single and you live in Nevada, a state without its own income tax: if you make $60,000 per year, your Federal tax bracket would be 22%. However, because your income tax is based on levels of brackets, you are not paying 22% of your income to taxes. Your effective tax rate would be 18.27%. 

At that income level, the percentage point difference is only 3.63%, but what if we were to land a C-Level gig? If we were to suddenly multiply our salary by 10x, our marginal tax rate bracket should be 37%. Yet someone earning $600,000 per year only has an effective tax rate of 30.41%, a percentage point difference of 6.59%! Even with FICA (payroll) taxes thrown into the mix, someone earning $600,000 per year still takes home over 8x more money than someone earning $60,000! 

A counterpoint could be made that taxing too high limits the drive of people to work. And to that I say: bullshit. In American work culture, people have been brainwashed into believing that spending more time at work is a good thing. People earning way less than $60,000 hustle many more hours than those earning $600,000. Yet apparently, it is too much to ask for higher income taxes on those earning more, even in an era where the salaries of the top 1% do not at all match the effort that they put into accumulating that wealth. 

This doesn't even take into account the accounting tricks used by the rich to shelter or hide their incomes from the IRS, that alone is a separate discussion. So looking at the bigger picture, a top tax income rate of 83% is not only fair, it is morally reprehensible that we do not have it in place when the bottom 50% of Americans only have 6% of all of the country's wealth. America may have a "progressive" tax system in place on paper, but in reality we are so far from it.

The Communist Manifesto in the 21st Century - Part I

The history of society is the history of class struggles. The infamous opening line of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto sets the stage for the pamphlet that would change the course of history. Yet, in the context of an American Primary and Secondary education, it is rarely discussed in-depth, if at all. I do not, and will not, pretend to be a philosophical torch bearer. This post is more a superficial analysis, to be boiled down into a single question: Is the Communist Manifesto relevant today? 

Let's put aside the whole Proletarian revolution and focus on the 10 demands made in the Manifesto in this series of posts starting chronologically:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
Obviously this point has not come to pass, in fact the issue has gotten worse. High housing costs in high-demand areas are not a new phenomena, yet what we're seeing today is an exaggeration of previous issues. Whereas before the Suburbs provided a safety valve to clamp down on excessive price increases, the so-called "Exurbs" which are so far situated from economic centers today, cannot serve that same purpose. With the current COVID-19 pandemic in progress, we could see this occur as more companies allow workers to work remotely. However, it is estimated that all those who could work from home (~30% of the workforce) are doing so now. The economic fallout from this pandemic could cause a flat-line, if not outright fall, in high demand areas. But at the end of the day, we are all just speculating about an issue created by assigning speculative value to land. 


For years we've heard that home-ownership is the best way to achieve wealth, and we of course saw that in the Post-WWII economy. Yet excessive price increases across the board across all sectors of the economy are pushing home-ownership out of reach for many Americans. In fact, many companies are now in the game of buying up housing to rent out. No longer are we dealing with "mom-and-pop" landlords and companies renting out apartment complexes, we're entering the era of a corporate takeover of single-family housing. For many, this is nothing new, as American home-ownership has hovered in the 60% range historically. But the economic fallout from "mom-and-pop" landlords getting pushed out will be interesting to see. Americans are apparently comfortable with a renting underclass in the 40% range, but what will become of society when that number increases? Consolidation under Capitalism is inevitable, and if the path to wealth-generation is cut-off for more and more Americans, what will happen then? 

The Capitalist would say that we will just move to cheaper places, or that the Corporate ownership of America's housing stock will free up resources to be put to use in some new and innovative way. But to those of us in the working class, this is not the future we want to live in. We are tied to the places where we grew up, and sure migration is a factor, but at the end of the day, what will happen when there is no other cheaper place to go? I do not have the answers to the questions I have posed, and policymakers appear to ignore them altogether by providing further incentives to our current system. I also do not know if the abolishment of private property is the answer, but what we do know, is that our current system is on a path that cannot and will not be sustained. And so as with other systemic issues in America, we will likely take not truly face this issue head-on until it is far too late.