Sitting on the beach at the Ritz Carlton discussing with Jesse the futility of saving for the boys' college, I'm reminded again of the need for a "confiscatory" top marginal tax rate. (The Ritz plays no small part in my thinking.) What? I'm going to save and save so that university presidents can collectively raise tuition 1,200% over three decades and reward themselves with multimillion dollar salaries?
Truly, I'd be more inclined if it all didn't seem so laughably impossible to think we could ever put aside enough to keep up with the tuition explosion. But if there's a solution, it's not in more federal grants to students or cheaper loans -- wherein I agree with my conservative brethren that federal policies have helped enable the universities. It's in getting at the root cause of the problem.
Then Jesse alludes to the old blackmail race-to-the-top (or bottom) dilemma that results in Wall Street CEOs getting 6-figure bonuses while taking a federal bailout, or weak environmental, health, and financial standards for corporations: if we tighten up, we won't be competitive with our peers. If state schools pay their presidents less, they won't be able to retain the best talent. I agree! (Although it's funny how this logic no longer applies to public officials; staff; federal, state, or local employees; teachers; cops; etc, etc, all professions where we think we'll get the best and most talented people even as we squeeze every drop out of them financially. But I digress...)
Which brings me back to a confiscatory top tax rate. Yes, "confiscatory!" If I run for public office someday, that's the word I'm going to use because I want to be clear that I'm not talking about the absurdly low Obama-Clintonian top levels that currently drive the Right to vein-popping apoplexy and comparisons to the Holocaust. I'm not talking about the 45% top marginal tax rate the progressives want. I'm talking real "confiscatory" tax policy.
The solution to sky-rocketing tuition rates and crushing student debt is to fix explosively-overpaid university bureaucracies and athletics departments, and the key to that isn't a pay cap on state schools or anyone else but rather the ongoing right to pay executive compensation at whatever rate the market will bear, without a ceiling, but with every income-earner knowing that 90% of anything s/he earns over, say, $4 million annually indexed to inflation, from all sources of income combined, will go straight into federal coffers.
That's absurd, you say. Communism! But I get a top marginal tax rate of 90% straight from the Eisenhower Administration when top marginal rates were as high as 92% at one point. But almost nobody actually paid that rate, you say, because almost nobody earned enough to meet the threshold. Exactly!, I say. Exactly.
CEOs had no incentive to pay themselves astronomical salaries knowing they couldn't keep most of it, and therefore they put more back into rank-and-file employee salaries/benefits, into long-term R&D and product development, and so forth. State universities had reasonable tuitions -- or were even free -- and private schools had them too.
The beauty of a top "confiscatory" tax rate lies in the fact that almost nobody pays it. It's "redistributive," but not in the sense that the federal government reallocates most of the funds. Individual institutions redistribute money themselves in ways that they deem most profitable over the long-term. It's not surprising that the greatest explosion in middle class wealth and prosperity occurred simultaneously with the highest top tax rates the US has ever seen.
But won't the ultrawealthy just flee the US? Yes, some will, and create their own personal Galt's Gulches, I hope. More power to them. (Though others may leave only to find it's cheaper to pay US taxes than pay for security fortresses, clean water, and so on in low-tax, small-government, high income-inequality, socio-economically-unstable banana republics like those of many tax havens.) And if they go, will anyone really miss Sheldon Adelson's or George and Jonathan Soros's or Charles and David Koch's or Michael Bloomberg's outsized influence on our government when they repatriate abroad?
Meanwhile, others will stay for the same reason that high-tax states like New York and Massachusetts have so many millionaires now: they're nice places with good schools and decent infrastructure, people want to live there, money flows to where the customers are, businesses need educated labor.
Feel free to argue the details with me in the comments, dear Facebook friends, though be forewarned: I'm about to start my elitist hammock nap so it may be awhile before the college-debt problems of the hoi polloi concern me again.
Truly, I'd be more inclined if it all didn't seem so laughably impossible to think we could ever put aside enough to keep up with the tuition explosion. But if there's a solution, it's not in more federal grants to students or cheaper loans -- wherein I agree with my conservative brethren that federal policies have helped enable the universities. It's in getting at the root cause of the problem.
Then Jesse alludes to the old blackmail race-to-the-top (or bottom) dilemma that results in Wall Street CEOs getting 6-figure bonuses while taking a federal bailout, or weak environmental, health, and financial standards for corporations: if we tighten up, we won't be competitive with our peers. If state schools pay their presidents less, they won't be able to retain the best talent. I agree! (Although it's funny how this logic no longer applies to public officials; staff; federal, state, or local employees; teachers; cops; etc, etc, all professions where we think we'll get the best and most talented people even as we squeeze every drop out of them financially. But I digress...)
Which brings me back to a confiscatory top tax rate. Yes, "confiscatory!" If I run for public office someday, that's the word I'm going to use because I want to be clear that I'm not talking about the absurdly low Obama-Clintonian top levels that currently drive the Right to vein-popping apoplexy and comparisons to the Holocaust. I'm not talking about the 45% top marginal tax rate the progressives want. I'm talking real "confiscatory" tax policy.
The solution to sky-rocketing tuition rates and crushing student debt is to fix explosively-overpaid university bureaucracies and athletics departments, and the key to that isn't a pay cap on state schools or anyone else but rather the ongoing right to pay executive compensation at whatever rate the market will bear, without a ceiling, but with every income-earner knowing that 90% of anything s/he earns over, say, $4 million annually indexed to inflation, from all sources of income combined, will go straight into federal coffers.
That's absurd, you say. Communism! But I get a top marginal tax rate of 90% straight from the Eisenhower Administration when top marginal rates were as high as 92% at one point. But almost nobody actually paid that rate, you say, because almost nobody earned enough to meet the threshold. Exactly!, I say. Exactly.
CEOs had no incentive to pay themselves astronomical salaries knowing they couldn't keep most of it, and therefore they put more back into rank-and-file employee salaries/benefits, into long-term R&D and product development, and so forth. State universities had reasonable tuitions -- or were even free -- and private schools had them too.
The beauty of a top "confiscatory" tax rate lies in the fact that almost nobody pays it. It's "redistributive," but not in the sense that the federal government reallocates most of the funds. Individual institutions redistribute money themselves in ways that they deem most profitable over the long-term. It's not surprising that the greatest explosion in middle class wealth and prosperity occurred simultaneously with the highest top tax rates the US has ever seen.
But won't the ultrawealthy just flee the US? Yes, some will, and create their own personal Galt's Gulches, I hope. More power to them. (Though others may leave only to find it's cheaper to pay US taxes than pay for security fortresses, clean water, and so on in low-tax, small-government, high income-inequality, socio-economically-unstable banana republics like those of many tax havens.) And if they go, will anyone really miss Sheldon Adelson's or George and Jonathan Soros's or Charles and David Koch's or Michael Bloomberg's outsized influence on our government when they repatriate abroad?
Meanwhile, others will stay for the same reason that high-tax states like New York and Massachusetts have so many millionaires now: they're nice places with good schools and decent infrastructure, people want to live there, money flows to where the customers are, businesses need educated labor.
Feel free to argue the details with me in the comments, dear Facebook friends, though be forewarned: I'm about to start my elitist hammock nap so it may be awhile before the college-debt problems of the hoi polloi concern me again.
Comments
Post a Comment